Vojnich’s use of materials and imagery has remained unchanged since the mid-1980s; she is able to create incredibly rich works from a limited, minimal means of expression, almost absorbing the viewer. Her paintings are as much about the sensuous treatment of facture as they are about the almost constant thematic, the empty interior. The interiors show details of the mysterious spaces of largely abandoned industrial facilities: vast assembly halls, underpasses devoid of human presence, empty paper mill basins, deserted courtyards, dried-up cisterns, barren machine rooms, and factory warehouses bulging with emptiness. Abandoned monuments of civilization, lifeless imprints of the past, are transformed into fragile, trembling rooms, projected interior spaces of the soul. Yet the silence of the grey walls, the suffocating confinement, is dissolved by the exits that appear in the paintings – doors, windows, winding staircases, gates and corridors opening to the outside world – and a softened, blurred twilight composed of diffused and reflected light, subtle transitions of rich colour, greyish tones and gentle, yet ragged, swirling brushstrokes.
The title of the painting in our collection refers to Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe), and within it to the fictional fortress of Bastiano, where the protagonist, trapped outside time, turns to face the enemy to be defeated, emerging from the fog, and spends his whole life in monotonous waiting.
Kriszta Dékei