Valentina Wecerka - What is Home?

Proportions, levels, materials, colour, backgrounds –the phenomenological characteristics of Val Wecerka’s works refer to the conditions of our perception of reality. No statical vision is possible there – we see dynamic fields that require the participation of the viewer.
As the single elements with their sculptural references claim their share in three-dimensionality, the image -as a symbolic space- is limited by the very physical dimension the artist is trying to transcend again and again.

At the sight of the completed images, inevitably the art of weaving and embroidery come to mind, activities where some part of their beauty lies within their accuracy and discipline.
The gestural repetitions hint to a very feminine traditional aspect: handcrafts, transmitted from generation to generation.

Wacerka modifies some functions of the material but she retains its associations, always starting by the perceptions she is interested in on a psychological level as a point of departure, intuitively. She associates and reassembles elements that do not necessarily belong together and eventually builds her own space with them, with material that reminds her of things.

For Wecerka there is nothing fixed or static, her art keeps oscillating between constructivity and irrationality, between appropriation and creation, between collective and subjective, between reality and fiction.

In her work, systematic reiterations assemble single elements to typographies or geometric arrangements, or at times two figurative or abstract paintings can constitute a dyptich.
The viewer’s first reaction being a mix of confusion and irritation, inevitably the search for the „message“ begins, by comparing the image’s elements with one another, and by searching for differences in the nonfigurative compositions.

The variations that become visible under closer scrutiny reveal the artisanal processuality with which Val Wecerka avoids the danger of any form of banality, in this sense she shows X-ray images of her interior.

The practice of varied techniques of the expanded or doubled image, with their share of ritual and experience, and of universality and individuality - this continuous dialogue produces nothing concrete, but a permanent balance a kind of necessary action striving for an equilibrium, in spite of its manifestation in objects.

Geometrically or as scripture, either way the elements are arrangend in a way to allow for a new appreciation of reality, even though the works can contradict each other or themselves. They are conservative and revolutionary, restrained and bold at the same time.

The organising principle relies on the succession of colours, figures and signs, but instead of calling for a step-by-step analysis, these images need to be comprehended by an intuitive synthesis. Although the decipherable structures yield contradictory information they still possess a kind of suggestive order.
The formal unity constitutes the foundation of her aesthetics, whereby the changeable alphabet -consisting of elements that can be assembled to different figures- provides for unlimited creative possibilities.

However, access to this spatial dimension remains a process of gradual evolution. In a first instance, these initial experiments merely seem to enumerate and identify the formal components of this new pictorial language.

In this way Wecerka opens a space of reflection in order to ponder on questions regarding her idiosyncratic concerns: identity, loss, appropriation. Around these subjects she created new possibilites of abstraction, setting up her own linguistical code. (written by Cem Angeli)

https://www.valwecerka.at/

Interviewee: Wecerka Val
Artworks by: Wecerka Val

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Maria Bruckmoser
Production country: Austria, Vienna