Petra Zlonoga’s work represents a departure from the classic process of creating an animated film. The artist does not base her process on a predefined narrative and visual composition, but leaves the conceptual impulse to free movement in all production phases.
This free process of creative thinking can completely change and reverse the initial theoretical concept and create a work of art in which the author’s intimate play can be read. By transforming segment units, which spontaneously organize and run themselves, Petra creates recognizable cycles that take place on the film and in the gallery.
The world in its total content, saturated with the richness of nature, being, spirituality and infinity, is a world that we cannot fully comprehend and visualize.
To create the impalpable, big and powerful to the eye, requires a simultaneous expansion of the perspective of observation, the visualization of what is behind the phenomenon, which also means deviation from the laws of physics and society.
Here the author finds a starting point for reflection and visualization of our reality.
The comprehensive space is not constructed by a geometric perspective of depth, but on the contrary, it opts for a simple, but layered two-dimensional film space, free from constructed dimensions.
Negating the boundaries of the media, Petra establishes a continuity by which she implies an alternative to the visually provided and comprehensible, an insight into the world where words and sounds do not describe what the eye ought to see, but express and clarify vague thoughts and invisible spaces.
Purified surfaces, simple drawings and warm tones of pure organic colors subtly enrich the atmospheric sound, whose comprehensive “scenes” illustrate the depth of the universe.
Drawn characters move freely, neither caring for the frame nor for the eye for the observer. Deprived of weight, they move freely in this “deep” world, questioning and seeking answers to the complex issues of our origin and existence.
Petra freely introduces the film world into the gallery space, allowing it to play its cycle of creation, separation and movement in all its variations and dimensions.
As with the film, all the elements move in their unique rhythm, weightless, indefinable and irregular, thus creating a match, which in its freedom reflects the spontaneous synchronicity of the cosmos.
The characters resist and emerge from the mathematical structure of space and the construction of specific bodies, they search and find. On the screen and in the gallery space, they flow and oscillate among us, pointing out that no frame is stable in relation to the world that is taking place.
By entering the gallery, the visitor becomes a part of that wonderful world where he experiences an impressive variation of their sizes in relation to his own size and specific rhythm.
Through this spatial imagination enriched with symbols, the drawings get discovered and “recognized”, while words and sound are meaningfully speaking of an infinite nature. They poetically express the thoughts and visualizations of Petra’s world; contemplative images of the personal and cosmic understanding of the life cycle, where each end represents a new beginning.
Iva Gašparović