July 26, 2024
In a two-venue show at Karma, New York, the artist’s hallucinogenic compositions see her staring into the heart of trauma. When Maja Ruznic was nine years old, she fled her home of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was 1992 and a brutal civil war was on the march. One day, at the Austrian refugee camp where she was living, Ruznic found herself in a sandbox. ‘I remember feeling the sand and rubbing it on my thighs and looking up at the sky. I was not raised with any religion, but I could feel the voice of God saying, “You will be okay”’, the painter told The Creative Independent in 2023. She traced her work ‘all the way back to that, because that was my entry into another realm. The sensation of the cosmos made me feel safe.’
The hallucinogenic, vertiginous paintings that comprise ‘The World Doesn’t End’, Ruznic’s two-venue show at New York City’s Karma, are a testament to the artist’s ability to stare into the heart of trauma and see kaleidoscopic possibilities. The show unfolds across two scales: small works in gouache on paper gather in one location, while monumental oil-on-canvas paintings overtake entire walls at the other space just up the street.
Eyes are everywhere. They form rows in Sleep (2023), their pupils pinpointed with miosis. In Song Makers (2024), an eyeball resembles a hooded head; another distant face is squinting, or winking, at a third profile with a bloodshot eye as additional figures, whose major identifying features are also eyes, gather to watch. Here, it’s as if Ruznic has applied the visionary geometry of Hilma af Klint to the mechanisms of vision itself.
Ruznic makes these smaller works by painting strata of gouache onto handmade Khadi paper, evoking the ways in which sediment gradually achieves heft as soil or memories attain narrative weight through repetition. It’s tempting to see them as studies for the larger oils, and indeed the colour fields and figures do scale up. Yet these works distil emotion with remarkable compression. In Child Birth (2023), an enigmatic blue face watches over a pink one that is almost entirely a scream. Sad Mom (2024) almost mirrors the arrangement of faces in Child Birth – except here, mother and child can’t bear to look each other in the eye.
The sweeping, Boschian On the Other Side (2023) features raving creatures encircling a pair who kiss under a sun so orange it aches. Joy is hard to find these days, but here it promises to lift itself right off the canvas. Geometry of Sadness (2023) includes a frame of tiny, colourful boots, maybe abandoned or cheerfully anticipating little feet; moody ghosts in mauves; and higgledy-piggledy letters which, per the press release, spell out the names of Bosnian culinary specialties. Dozens of details add up to an absence that consumes you.
Ruznic finds an ultimate synthesis in Arrival of Wild Gods II (2023). Here, her layers are at their most distinct and dizzying. The mythic figures that populate the scene almost seem to move, articulated in ways that call to mind the worldly children of Maurice Sendak, the adolescent jump scares of Austin Osman Spare, the eternal clarity of Georgia O’Keeffe – anyway, the painting is doing a lot, including integrating a quasi-Pietà at its centre complete with blue stigmata’d feet. When I visited the painting during a brutal heat wave, I was stunned and stared at it for some twenty minutes. I swore I saw my own trauma appearing and reconfiguring itself in each of Ruznic’s essential lines; I swore I saw grains of sand in its golden-hour palette, the too much and the never enough of life and death itself. All was safe, if only for a blink of an eye.
