15/01/2019 Severine Grosjean
Nina Čelhar is one of the most promising Slovenian painters. She is a painter of the last generation who remains faithful to traditional painting using canvas, color and brush.
The work of this painter is characterized by her own artistic language, a search for balanced surfaces and the creation of an atmosphere. She chooses modern residential patterns, whether in the absence or in the presence of a communicative human being. Her paintings focus on elements that hide the intimate space through the impression of a unified materiality, making it harmonious and peaceful.
Shortly after completing her studies, she formed a language of sovereign painting characterized by a limited range of colors and limited poetics, as well as by the iconography of a single-family modern house in terms of content. Painting is a deeply intimate experience for this young painter. Her creative process is slow.
Nina Čelhar’s works require a sensible spectator capable of remaining motionless. She finds the living space extremely important. The light and the heat of the space where the public is placed often determine their mood. The representation of the house conveys a sense of comfort, intimacy, family despite the simplified forms of the facades. Most of these views are anonymous. This is what she explores in her paintings through the materials, the colors, the light. She uses colors like white, gray, beige and green to create specific moods. She is looking for the ideal space for the contemporary human as in her work “House”. It is with the choice of colors that she seeks tranquility. However, some people are embarrassed by the subject because contemporary architecture is a delicate subject. The feeling of security is felt despite a silence reigning in the immensity of spaces and buildings painted. Nina Celhar is attached to a certain silence in her painting to keep this pure state and focus on observation without artifice.
The exposed paintings give you the impression of being overexposed and soft, while remaining so minimal that they remain open to our own reflections.
Nina Celhar paints different house plans with great details. This “portrait” is the only subject without any animated life. It is essentially a descriptive representation. Nature plays an important role with these few traces of green plants placed on the canvas. This gallery of paintings is like a curious sample of an era. Like still lifes, Nina creates a compromise between the data of the sensation and the reality of the canvas in a pure surface.
We know the beautiful formula of St. John Damascene: “After all, an image is a memory aid. It is to the illiterate what a book is to the literati and what the word is to the hearing, what the image is to the sight.”.
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
