Artist: Paula Tončić
Title: Eyes without Face
Text: Lea Vene
Venue: Galerija Manuš
The exhibition Eyes without Face is based on in-depth research into materials that carry the potential for magical and ritual manifestation. Each carefully selected material encapsulates multiple past lives, initiating a process of further transmutation. Unique organic histories are layered collage-like to bring new possible biographies of hybrid entities to life. The presented materials are simultaneously recognized as intimate and familiar, but also unsettling elements of domestic interiors, children’s rooms, wardrobes, and drawers. Leather, fur, plastic, and glass surfaces now redefine the meaning of domestic space.
Discarded animal skin is used as a canvas that primarily carries images taken from online applications for selling clothing and objects, where those same images are likewise exchanged as commodities. Like flashes of memory, the images uncontrollably blend into one another, suggesting the coexistence of these photographic traces. The figure of a face stands out as the only seemingly living element of the composition. Eyes that seek a gaze establish communication and manipulate.
In the space, we are greeted by an animal presence resembling a plush tiger, crudely taxidermied with fragments of fur and skin. The tiger’s face and body disintegrate, and the eyes disappear. An unfinished entity fixed in the moment of its creation, on the threshold between the living and the nonliving, like a toy that no longer wishes to be one. We also notice a biomorphic glass form resembling a vase as it flows into the space, seeking a relationship with other organic elements of the estranged environment.
The exhibition Eyes without Face is not a closed whole of works with predefined relationships; on the contrary, it invites the viewer to personally and directly confront the raw materiality of the installation. Appropriated textures, surfaces, and smells now appear as images that we can further exchange, possess, and manipulate.
Paula Tončić (born 1997, Zagreb) in her artistic practice works with archives, images, objects, film, and sound. She uses the process of archiving as a method for exploring time, social structures, and their disappearance. Her work is driven by an interest in material as a carrier of memory – trace, error, and transience as key elements.