LISA NELSON RAABE

Vera Scekic of Racine, Wis., recently displayed “Synthetic Being,” at the Contemporary Art Center of Peoria. Moderately sized paintings, full of forms reminiscent of petri dishes repeat across colored surfaces, recalling the ringed expressions of laboratory tables, investigations of cell-like blooms and abutted shapes. One feels the potential of burgeoning life forms not identified beyond the cellular matrix. Are we witnessing organic and natural, grown and cultivated, planned and designed or found and uncovered?

Scekic’s work is all of the above. Although the surface is not actually moldy and deformed, her approach explores that kind of growth. Avoiding the painterly expressiveness of drips and spontaneous overlaid materiality that Expressionism purports, Scekic remains firmly in contact with that spirit. She pairs delicate explorations within an even-tempered approach. What could become a chaotic mess of interactions resolves into a serene sense of controlled composition, surface and structure.

‘Mapping Contours, Granny Smith Green’ by Vera Scekic.

The maker here, Vera Scekic is in charge of subject and object although we are not given the actual substance or context of the image beyond it’s true identity as paint. She works within a grid, cross referencing through color, similarity, and difference amidst intimately cultivated shape. The sense of other, of the studied and contained persists. She offers the sense of wonder of the micro universe as contemporary painting practice.

‘Mapping Contours’ (granny smith green) by Vera Scekic.

Scekic’s body of work explores how paint responds to gravity and containment while interrupted by viscosity, absorption, distraction and cohesion. How one substance melds into or fractures apart is presented within a pared-down minimalism, one in which forms grow and coalesce organically yet with the precision and control of a studied experiment. Cellular disc shapes, finely sanded colored planes, are inhabited by chance outcomes. She explores light vs. opacity, flatness vs. dimensionality, containment vs. spread and control vs. coincidence. She shows her hand, admits variance and variety even as the image reads repeatedly as the same.

Installations that Scekic creates explore these principals on a much larger scale. Cook County Administration Building in downtown Chicago housed two wall pieces 18×15 feet that face each entitled Bilateral Symmetry. These large grids of repeated colors appear but can never be an exact reproduction. In Microarray, a floor piece, Scekic uses 1,440 upside down styrofoam cups with paint poured into the bottom to create a floating plane of dots emulating computer generated data. This is a hallmark of Scekic’s work, intensely experimental yet highly controlled within a grid. We find a flat sense of the picture plane and pure sense of color and form, challenging the manufactured and ready made against the organicity of handwork.

Although the work presents a serene depiction of process, there is more involvement than one might expect. Scekic describes delicately sanding the thin layers of peeled paint, often splicing and adding, cutting into and adhering multiple layers to expand the surface quality while arriving at her image. One finds that the tactile quality of hand-held paint within a prescribed expressionist exploration gives way to a much more analytical sense of structure.

Vera Scekic is the co-owner of OS Projects in Racine. Check out her website here. Her artwork on the web can be found by clicking here space here.