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Nataša Colja Obiako, Academic Painter, 2005
Karmen Bajec, with a series of paintings presented at the exhibition in Velenje, develops her reflections on materiality, substance, color, surface, shape, contour, and the very presence of the painting.
Her works are closely linked to her personality. The truth is that every painter identifies with their work. What first struck me about her painting was the opportunity to observe how precisely and slowly the paintings are created. Every stroke, every application of color is carefully considered, and every thought re-evaluated.
These paintings are not ordinary landscapes, nor are they any other familiar locational spaces; instead, they are uniquely constructed worlds that are neither completely unreal nor entirely fantastical. They are entirely meditative. These are spaces where cloud-like forms rest, or simply “loci” seeking the attention of an alert eye.
Before the works we see today were created, the artist went through various techniques and materials that allowed her to express the true idea. Her paintings with dry pastels, for example, perfectly reflect the precision and patient mastery of the emerging “shimmering” surface. Despite the fact that the application of color to the surface of the painting with dry pastels is limited, it sometimes achieves incredible hapticness and materiality of the canvas. The very controlled and meticulously arranged surface is often covered with an apparently completely uncontrolled pour of alkyd-oil mixture, realized with a spontaneous gesture; this achieves the contrast and communication of two different fields that intertwine and overlap. Applying color layers follows the goal of retaining as much light as possible on the surface. Therefore, the upper layer, in contrast to the lower one, appears shiny, watery, while the lower layer is less radiant, its light trapped inwardly.
Now her paintings have lost a certain duality and have become more visually unified, as she almost no longer uses dry pastels. The temperament and characteristic of these have been replaced by oil, which in the first layer is dense, buttery, opaque, and in the pour remains glaze-like or transparent. She does not always use pours; instead, sometimes velvet applications appear, protruding from the painting’s surface, inviting a sense of greater materiality. The use of colors is mainly based on porcelain-chalky shades of calm colors. You will generally not notice black in the painting. The reason for her sense of a harmonious atmosphere lies in the way the colors are applied to the painting’s surface, where the colors do not gain in intensity. Sometimes the color application is dense, opaque, or immaterial, glaze-like, the brush gesture and contour of shapes in both applications being very calm, sensitive, and careful. The composition is not dynamic; it is very static, with shapes sometimes settling into it horizontally or vertically. The independent color forms, which are another of her peculiarities, act as if they are silently floating among spatial layers. According to her, they derive from the human body, stripped of any logical recognizability, transformed into organic “cocoon-like” structures that lean in spatially defined directions.
She is also interested in experimenting, testing, and exploring the possibilities of a painting’s existence, defining its own rules. At the same time, she tries to eliminate everything that was unnecessary on the painting and would seem like superfluous clutter. With this intervention, she creates her own order and discipline, striving for meditative asceticism.
Paradoxically, in the artistic sense, she is drawn to those things she most avoids, those she tackles for the first time, as the painter is most concentrated on the task that requires something completely new and unexperienced. Even she does not know how she will respond to the resulting situation, which demands a different approach, productive thinking, and ultimately solving the problem.
And finally, the world we live in today shows us its external appearance, transience, and uncertainty. The works of Karmen Bajec are one of the refuges for the spirit, allowing it to slip through the surface of the world and find peace within itself.
Miloš Bašin, Gallery of Bežigrad, 2012
The paintings presented by Karmen Bajec consist of vertical color strips in the style of geometric abstraction. These are temporal landscapes that attempt to capture the spirit of time and place. In this endeavor, she relies on the color shades of nature during different times of the day and year across various geographic locations around the world. Thus, she explores the color and light of Mediterranean and Nordic landscapes, house facades, specific motifs from nature, and motifs from her personal archetypal world.
With her natural gift for sensing light, she attempts to capture the atmosphere of a place, also showing the progression in abstraction. She develops it to the extreme, as in the painting, from the color bands, only one stroke or figure remains, intended to calm the eye and allow introspection.
“It seems that the paintings are illuminated by an invisible source of light that they themselves emit. The color shades vibrate in silence and intertwine with each other, so that the paintings fill us with tranquility and meditativeness.
This is the visual silence of peace and calmness. Inner images, transformed into colorful painterly language, represent the harmony of the world, which is an essential part of her creation and life.”
Polona Škodič, art historian, 2015
The latest creations of the painter represent a return to nature through the experience of exploring archetypal motifs, which she encountered while observing nature and reflecting on the values of this world. Abstract landscapes recede into the background of the paintings, retaining the spirit of an imagined sphere of space, to which the forms of a dog, horse, hand, or insect are added. These forms, with their precise delineation and voluminousness, evoke memories of images the painter has experienced.
The images she incorporates into her paintings stem from her symbolic unconscious world. During a period of abstract thinking, she managed to bring them forth and merge them with the meanings they represent. Thus, the character of an animal, for example, signifies the character of thought inherent in the title of the painting. The horse represents movement, travel; the dog, a loyal companion fighting for a reward; the bird, with its interpretation of freedom, aids a good thought in soaring into the sky.
Anamarija Stibilj Šajn, art historian, 2016
The painting of Master of Arts Karmen Bajec is distinguished by her unique, visually refined, and robust creative stance. She has never been swayed by the popular artistic approaches or technologies of the so-called new media. Expressing herself in oil and acrylic techniques, she thus reaffirms the appeal and vitality of traditional painting. Born in 1981, she emerged at the start of a decade that saw several young authors who reinstated and reasserted the role and significance of classical painting mannerisms in the Slovenian context. The power and charm of colors, the work with the brush, and the fascination of the color trail that forms a narrative staging a miracle where color embodies into an image, and strives to achieve various visual and expressive effects, are indeed irreplaceable and enchanting lures that accompany her transformations of the initial motivational impulse towards an intimate visual valuation. Her painting explorations range from realism to abstraction, from figurative to indeterminate subjects, but they are particularly notable for their deep symbolic meaning and grounding in the language of symbols.
Her works prove that she is a subtle observer, for whom the chosen motif is both an optical norm and a personal discourse among fundamental symbolic signs, their meanings, and values. They also represent a soul’s resonance with old forms and primordial shapes like the circle, square, and triangle—figures that carry divine geometry and power and possess eternal wisdoms and messages. Her experiences of landscapes, flora, and fauna, through such perception, attain a particularly unique resonance. They become pursuits of values that are fading, of peace and order, of a state of observation, experience, and at the same time, meditative withdrawal, of that which is tranquil and sublime.
Tatjana Pregl Kobe, art historian, 2022
Some paintings consist of vertical stripes of different, more or less intense colors, attempting to capture a specific time and space. And motif. Does the painter, with her forehead pressed against the window glass, like observers of sorrow, listen to the wind (“Wind on the Mountain,” 2015) or somewhere on the mountain seek her lost? Does she recall the ending summer? The scent of autumn, the feeling of delay? Perhaps birds know the truth, chirping somewhere in the treetops (“Birds in Flight,” 2015)? Is there a captured brown strand of girl’s chestnut hair in the painting “Cows Grazing” (2015)? The painter’s vitality, untamedness? Anything is possible and none of it (perhaps) is true. In the images of the artist, who seeks colors in nature at different times of the day and year, what we do not see is equally important.
Karmen Bajec’s painting is a serene way of preserving memories of magical moments. The titles of her paintings are enigmatic, enchanting, leading straight into our viewer’s intimacy. The viewer is placed in a state where illusion exists not to deceive the eye but to allow them to see better and more. Something so primordially intimate strikes the viewer like an earthquake of something inexpressible. The painter, as an explorer of color aspects, continually establishes her geometric abstract order, in which she reflects, recognizes, and discovers herself.
