Their True Nature

Year: 2010
Technique: series of 5 drawings, ink on paper, 29,7 x 21 cm

The series of five drawings deals with a belief system called astrology. The text is taken from various daily horoscopes for my astrological sign published on one of the online horoscope sites. The only intervention I made to the texts is the grammatical change in order to properly describe the objects/subjects of the drawings.

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The soft, unbroken line of the drawings in the series Their True Nature, by Vesna Bukovec, complements the texts and heightens the tension in the meaning of the words and the lines of the letters. The drawings are restrained and quiet, but in a certain way also very precise and demanding, for they require a special attitude of the viewer. But the drawings are not directly connected with the meaning of the texts in any way we usually expect, namely, that the picture illustrates the writing or that the writing explains the picture. The texts use the third person singular instead of the second-person direct address customary in horoscopes. As a result, we find ourselves in an ambivalent position: on the one hand, we are looking at drawings that are not signs from the zodiac, and on the other, at texts, and are unable to come fully to terms with either. We want the texts to describe the drawings even though we realize that the drawings do not illustrate them. These works’ humorous, even absurd, character, which reminds us of fables, pulls us into a spiral of meanings that volley back and forth from picture to text, and the resulting vortex causes a change in our viewpoint because of the moral that is absent.

Excerpt from the text “Clarity is everything right now” by Jernej Kožar
[full text (eng) / besedilo (slo)]