Time doesn‘t exist. There is only a perpetual present * by by Giuliana Montrasio

Observing to discover - observing to explore - observing to confront… observing to demonstrate the impossibility to express what you see. Every individual sails looking for his own place, his own story, his own images for making comparison with them, searching his own obsessions and fears, with the intention of taking the mask off the reality that surrounds us. Julia Tschaikner, a young Austrian artist that lives in Berlin, through a painting made up of different levels, puts in the heart of her job a reflection on the complexity and ambiguity of the relationships among people and between people and their society, in connection with the multiplicity and speed of images that we face everyday. Through light coloured canvases, fresh and spontaneous, in contradiction with the dramatic force of the subjects, the artist's narration is centralized on people's sense of confusion inside the cold contemporaneousness. "My paintings speak about the indifference that is part of the survival strategy against the mass of information and images to which we are subject." Every picture tells a story. The figures stay on the canvas just like hanged in a liquid ambient, in a perfect dialogue with the drawings that act as a soundtrack and as clarifying elements of the new artist's vision that she can reach after a long work of deep reflection and observation. This pictorial universe becomes a mental place between reality and dreams, a space between daily experience and imagination. Inside it, the figures placed in the canvas in a flexible way create a sensation of alienation and isolation. The painter creates some separations, some blurring between the real world and the world created by her, between interior visions and dreams, to explore the unpredictability of our perception. Julia Tschaikner blends element, images and themes, coming from different times too, trough the combination of two opposite expressive ways, the poetic and slow way of painting and the technical and fast way of graphics, laying stress on the role that time assumes inside the work itself. To stop the time, the images that run quickly, that flow continuously under our eyes, trough the filter of our own experiences to reach the representation of an imaginary and metaphorical world as a comprehension of the modern society. "Painting for me is an expression of a film in slow motion, to stop, to focus this visual culture that runs faster and faster." Shapes, figures, profiles, got from the internet, or from fragments of advertising brochures or from some media's icons, frozen in a contemporary collage, live together in the space of the canvas to tell of an encounter, linked not only to the artist's personal experience but related to political and social themes. The icons and the heroes, stereotypes of the modern society, are emptied of their contents to incorporate elements that contaminate; they are destructured to be transformed in solitary figures, with the intention of representing the vulnerability that gives them transparence and sensitiveness. The spectator can, on a first level, perceive the work as an aesthetic product only but on a second and more careful level, understand the deep meanings, reading the various elements shown on the canvas, following the narrative structure that is revealed as a movie sequence or a comic strip. The world represented in the paintings by Julia Tschaikner contain a new vision, that sets us free from reality, and becomes a vehicle for auto-reflection and research into new relations that allow us to invent again our capacity to observe.

by Giuliana Montrasio

* Claude Chabrol