Both delicate and forceful, Tanja Softić’s paintings
are like visual poems, offering up lyrical pictorial passages that are richly
layered with meaning and technique. Tanja knows how to balance things, pitting
geometric forms against lacy filigree, silhouettes against drawn lines, blocks
of bold color against washed-out hues. She uses veils of muted green and rose
to form a backdrop for her idiosyncratic iconography that brings
together glimpses of botany, biology and technology. These complex arrangements
of fragments relate to each other visually, but also have a potent relational
significance to the artist.
Recently, Tanja has become interested in splats. The kind
you see on studio floors or on the street. They’re images of impact, of
violence. She employs artificially made ones and ones that naturally occur
during the painting process. The very deliberate way she goes about producing
the former is interestingly complex. First she spills the ink to make the
blots, than she photographs them, then she plays with them in Photoshop,
stretching or compressing them. When she’s satisfied, she projects the
manipulated image onto the painting’s surface and outlines them. It’s all about
process. “A weird circuitous way,” she says, “Going from actual, to digital, to
actual, to digital and so forth. It’s funny how we set up these obstacle
courses. But you need all these obstacles in order to get the thoughts worked
out.”
Tanja Softić: Migrant Universe, a traveling show that explores the fragmented and multilayered experience of the immigrant organized by the Halsey Gallery, Charleston, SC will be on view at the University of Richmond (where Softić is a professor) August 20 - October 6. http://tanjasoftic.com/
