Vesna Neferamis conveys thoughts, feelings and experiences through the medium of painting. She translates her inner essence, power and energy into artistic energy. Her feelings of the moment in all its complexity become a burst of artistic substance. The artefacts are confessional, both in artistic execution, which is unstoppable, fluid, intuitively guided, as in imagination, which represents travel, circulation, spilling, streaming, layering and structuring of coloured masses.
The author expresses herself freely, without precisely defined contents. She creates images that are embedded in a wide field of abstraction, especially expressionistic and colouristic, and a careful observer can also discover specific segments, in particular associative, suggestive and symbolic clues. Yet nothing is imposed upon him because the author’s freedom of creation is the observer’s freedom of viewing and seeing at the same time. The paintings have a completely open meaning and reveal themselves to each person in their own way.
With them, the author creates an intangible painting. In the first decades of the 20th century, painting broke with a long-standing tradition, that is, with the art of representing images. In Modern Art, art historian Meyer Schapiro writes that this change in painting and sculpturing can be compared with the most remarkable revolutions in science, technology and social thought. The idea of art has shifted from the point of view of an image to an expressive, constructive, inventive approach. It came to what Plato advised when he stated that, in the ideal Country, the mimetic rendering should be prohibited since the absolute idea is always covered and therefore not available to immediate perception. In the world of artistic creation, freedom has been introduced, which has had a greater range of expression as one of its consequences. Art became more personal, intimate, sublime, the artist was allowed to explore and experiment, which in the past could not even be imagined due to solid arts laws.
In order for Vesna Neferamis to pour as much of herself into the paintings as possible, to incorporate the maximum amount of authorial intimacy into it, she uses precisely this “style” of expression. She lets herself speak and come to life on the paintings, and this in a sincere attitude to creation.
The ability of the abstract image is to present the invisible through the visible, and thus to cross over to the level of the spiritual object. The result of this is the discovery of how highly expressive and sublime abstract art can be, as it enables the artist to see beyond the tangible, to infiltrate the infinite from the finite, to reach the absolute.
According to Hegel, all sensuality is mediated through spirituality, but the work of art is neither pure thought nor bare sensuality, but the synthesis of both. And the paintings of Vesna Neferamis have it all.
Since Vasily Kandinsky has already found that colours, like sound in music, have direct access to the soul, Vesna has chosen them as the companions and bearers of her expression and confession. The author feels colours in a special way. To her, they do not just represent material substantiality, which enables her artistic-visual action, and thus the creation of visible images, but she feels them as interlocutors who listen to her, follow her, and enable her to express her most intimate world. They are her allies and confidants. She proves how powerful their expressive power is in every creative step.
Her colour palette is wide open. It represents the colours of life, in all their diversity, bright and dark, glowing and extinguished, warm and cold. The author plays with the colours, but her colour game is clearly personally guided. Thus she urbanises the image field, transforms it into a multifaceted, living, pulsating image organism. This overflows with the power of vibrant, pure, full chromatic hues that communicate with each other, layer, spill, flow and pass from their primary state into the secondary, mixed one. Through layering, fusions and radiance, the colour palette is additionally enriched and gaining new values. With them, the author creates abstract patterns, sophisticated microstructures, colour and tonic harmony, since all this colourful diversity leads to a state of balanced wholes.
The colours also have symbolic strength. There are plenty of earth, green and violet tones, but blue holds a special place. It is a colour that can be associated with infinity, longing and divinity. Undoubtedly, the blue colour is the deepest, most immaterial and purest, and leads to spiritual sensations. Also, the colour of gold has a special power, as it is radiant, warm, shiny and carries a touch of the divine.
For Vesna Neferamis, colour is a medium, which enables her sensible expression and the giving of herself. It is a substance that is not only attractive to the eyes but also overwhelms the body and soul. Thus, the basic artistic element also becomes a source of positive sensations and energy.
In creating, the painter is faithful to her “own hand”, and this translates internal events into exterior ones. Her design is characterized by a gestural approach, direct, lightweight, unstoppable, which has an expressive, thus, a personal character. The layers, created by the hand, are characteristically diverse. Many have a distinctly thought-out effect, and many represent an artistic eruption, unstoppable, relaxed, unbridled creation of traces, both in terms of paint dripping and tashistic solutions. The application of colours differs from lazure to synthesized states, which appear in the form of the most consistent materiality. Thus, the paintings have distinctive structural accents in some places and are not only visually perceptible but also haptically exciting.
In the dynamic happenings on the image surface, there are also engravings that cut into the colour substance and open the image organism into depth. The path to spatial illusion also produces multi-layered colour membranes and light flares somewhere far in the background.
In spite of the fact that the paintings are mainly dominated by contently vague events, they often have precisely drawn out spirals or vibes. As Chevalier writes in the Dictionary of Symbols, the spiral is encountered in all cultures and is full of symbolic meanings. The spiral manifests the appearance of circular motion and prolongs it to infinity. It thus represents the repeated rhythms of life, the circular character of development and continuity. And then there are other forms of the circle, the symbol of perfection, infinity, and the possibility of new beginnings. The circle is a primeval image that carries within the divine geometry that contains power and possesses eternal wisdom and message.
The works of art are dynamically and compositionally designed, and the lively internal happenings include the entire image field, and extends optically even beyond the edge, into a wider space. Some image concepts gravitate toward the central design and lead to focus, especially when such a design is realized on a square image carrier.
For Vesna Neferamis, painting is a medium that translates her intuitive vibrations and reflects her inner atmosphere and power. Artefacts that contain the intimacy of the painter’s depths and, at the same time, the infinity of cosmic proportions are close to the thought of Vasily Kandinsky, who says that there are works of art with autonomous content that emanate the creator’s spirit, creations that draw their power and existence from the artist himself.
Anamarija Stibilj Šajn
University Graduate Art Historian and Art Critic
