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The spirit of space and time
Mirjana Matić

04/09/2026

Mirjana Matić is a painter who, in her artistic practice, consistently relates to Croatian Istria, where she lives and creates. Although she is attracted to that world, she does not linger in it in a mimetic, documentary manner. From that picturesque landscape, she sets out in search of its spiritual and symbolic dimensions, in discovering what the Latin expression genius loci calls the spirit of place. She captures that elusive esprit in carefully, selectively chosen identifying elements of the landscape and pours it into artistic means of expression, thus building the presence of a specific identity of space. In her creation, she cultivates sharpened artistic and aesthetic norms and through them strengthens the expressiveness and content of her works. She purifies the picturesque landscape, focuses on the most essential and shapes these most eloquent elements into archetypal carriers. She marks them with concise and clear design solutions. She emphasizes the essence of form, but in no way diminishes their representation and significance. Her ascetic approach functions according to the principle of less is more or just enough. Every thing remains part of the spatial logic and its own story and carries a deeper meaning and significance. Architecture is indispensable in her painting. It is an artistic challenge and a witness to life. The author is interested in the walls of old houses, as well as the life behind them, which always maintains a sense of mystery, since we do not encounter figures in her villages. The walls had an exceptional visual-suggestive value for Leonardo da Vinci and Piero di Cosimo. Matić builds them in an artistic way, as exact, clearly outlined surfaces of gray and white tones and noble microstructures. On these walls, which have a tactile value in addition to the visual, we can feel the stone, sand and lime. Their statics are strong and we can define them as compositional carriers. The houses are elegant and tall, in some solutions even without openings or with small windows. She often leans cypress or pine trees against the houses. Although the motifs reflect the painter’s contact with reality, the scenes have a solemn, dignified, serene and heroic effect. They seem to be torn between the physical and the metaphysical, to have a touch of Arcadia, to silently but powerfully defy oblivion. Even when the author “parks” a car in front of an architectural backdrop, the scene seems frozen in some other, past time. Sometimes the houses do not have clearly laid foundations, but grow from the lower edge of the picture and therefore seem unearthly; but their solidity is unwavering and they climb all the way to the sky. The spaces between the houses open up the view to the horizon and give a sense of infinity. Mirjana Matić’s paintings are not just a memory of the old village, of walls or architectural details, a view of the horizon and a touch of earth and sky. They are also a natural environment in which she abandons details and also opts for a minimalist approach. In them, she plants the pure forms of pointed cypresses or round and semicircular pine crowns. She also treats the organic world with geometric stylization and, along with the square or rectangle that belongs to architecture, continues to open meaningful dialogues between forms. Both architecture and trees are symbolic verticals, landmarks between the material and the spiritual, and thus the objectification of the painter’s thoughts that possess a deeper content behind the scenes of external phenomena. For intermezzo, she creatively walks through the fields in the form of wide-open panoramic designs. Although her creative attitude is more classically realistic, the atmosphere of these landscape parts is still calming and unique to the author. The purity of form, the treatment of surfaces, the limited concept of colors that gravitate mainly towards white, gray, blue and green, colors that appear in a more or less homogeneous role, are qualities and at the same time the peculiarities of the author’s oeuvre. She rarely adds accents of warmer tones to carefully selected colors, which determine light transitions. She also opts for brick-red surfaces, with which she further strengthens the connection with her living space, while at the same time maintaining a noble coloristic design. The structures that give her painting an unmistakable identity are a modernist accent and at the same time a material connection with reality, from walls to nature. The diverse and rich structural values ​​give the creations a special artistic charm and represent a powerful reviving moment. Based on the structural values, the selected color denominators also expand into new values ​​when exposed to external light. Light has a special meaning in Matić’s painting, it models space, establishes atmosphere and reveals structures. And it is much more than just an optical phenomenon, because it is also the bearer of content, a connecting element between the outer and inner world, a symbolic insight into the duality of life, stretched between light and darkness. An important constructional tool for her is active, flowing drawing, with which she establishes and defines her world. Although it is often invisible, it clearly demarcates coloristic planes. Drawing also appears in the form of engraving, with which she cuts into the material substance and defines it even more clearly in terms of content. Mirjana Matić’s paintings are a sense of belonging and feeling.

Anamarija Stibilj Šajn

Mirjana Matić was born in 1955 in Pula. She was educated in Višnjan, Poreč and Rijeka. She graduated in fine arts from the Pedagogical Academy in Rijeka. She worked as a teacher of fine arts in several schools in Istria. She organized and led pedagogical painting and graphic workshops in her own studio. She exhibited at several solo and group exhibitions in Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other countries. She is a member of the HDLU of Istria. She lives and works in Višnjan