Collages - Handicraft With Words

Svetlana Slapšak’s collages are obviously a secondary product of an artist who enjoys combing words to such an extent that colours sometimes also become necessary. By choosing a modest and un-pretentious collage technique, which she believes is adequate for an amateur/child, and by placing her creativity into ‘the mystery of cooking in the afternoon’ she plays with the ideological directness of this technique, with its propaganda potential. But instead of a clear message, her collages are misleading and cause false interpretations in which a feigned naivety is only the first trap. Observers slowly become acquainted with a world of risky changes and ironic jumps; they are shown how much of their attention is actually demanded from them, so that finally they are expected to do exactly what they did not expect - the authority of knowledge. Instead of transforming everyday objects into the unusual, Svetlana Slapšak’s collages transform unusual objects into the everyday: symbolic, prestigious, artistic, texts difficult to understand, formulae for the well-informed. Two types of spatial organisation may be found in her collages. In the first, plans and designs for a ground plan (archeological finds, cities, maps) are combined with vertical surfaces; so the ground plan of Euripides’ theatre becomes a semi-circle of the burning sun for an imaginary horizon, and an unknown Athenian house becomes the setting for the apotheosis of poetry created in the naive style of Greek handicrafts. In the second she constructs imaginary landscapes and interiors, theatre boxes and frames which interact, and in this confinement she produces melancholic meanings. Culture and gender and probably the most melancholy invention of people - nature, appear in these collages in their ultimate, ironical hypostasis.