Surface and reality

In Monday’s lunch talk in Hallein, Bulgaria born painter and film maker Mara Mattuschka discussed some of the ideas which underlie her work. She is concerned with contrasts between surface appearances and inner realities, and the ways in which art can express and represent these contrasts.

Mattuschka began with a few words about her studio practice. She currently has a studio in Vienna where she paints. There is a great difference, she says, between the painter, who is effectively fixed, in a physical sense, in one place, and the film maker, who is nomadic. When she uses her studio she has a fixed routine: at eight each morning she visits a certain coffee shop, where she talks with friends and acquaintances, before heading to the studio to work. Film making, however, requires quite different approaches, as the necessity to work with so many different people and places means that such routines are not possible.

The main body of her talk considered quite abstract notions of perception, identity, surface and personality. She is not interested in biography in the simplistic sense of biographical facts: writing a CV, she suggests, is just a “cynical gag”. Rather, it is the process of life that makes us who we are. Film in particular has the power to explore the depths of personality. She showed several examples of her film work, which sought to delve into these issues: for example, it is problems such as a “fear of looking” - the concern that in peering into another we reveal too much of ourselves - which so often bedevil human relationships.

She concluded with an insistence that art exploring such questions cannot be too abstract, as then it would not be legible to most viewers. Her work seeks to find a way that is obvious to express the mood or idea in question, so that as many as possible can understand.