CEVIGA

You’ve got stuck in the moment

And you can’t get out of it

So goes the famous song lyric by the Irish rock band U2. To be stuck in a moment is pictured as something negative, a detrimental experience holding the unknown interlocutor of the U2 song from a brighter and better future. But what if being stuck in a moment was actually a desirable state of being. One which one should aspire to, rather than escape from. To linger and not snap out of a moment can have its benefits as artist Ceviga shows, especially when the enduring moment is a revelatory one. In her latest body of work Ceviga pays tribute to the moment that you can’t get out of; one which she is keen to re-live over and over again.

Ceviga’s work operates on two levels. The first is purely formal and specifically gestural. The second is conceptual, and by this I do not hint at the paired down aesthetic that has come to characterise Conceptual Art. Ceviga’s conceptualism is rooted in the realm of thought, and in the combination of both Eastern and Western ideas. For example, she cites the Greek philosopher Heraclitus as having had a deep influence on her thinking. Ceviga borrows from him the notion that ‘everything flows’—meaning that nothing is ever truly still, and all constantly moves and changes. This applies to both humans and nature alike, and the perpetual movement, spiralling and shifting through space is visualised by Ceviga in a new series of paintings titled Spiral Shelter. On a purely formal level, these works are gesturally laden and saturated with vivid colours. On a visionary one, the Spiral Shelter paintings give visual expression to what it means to be part of this unerring flow of change, which Ceviga describes as fundamental in ‘shaping our consciousness and understanding of self and of the wider world.’

For the artist every painting is a projection of a state of mind, be it happiness or sorrow. Life and art feed off one another. Each painted brushstroke makes manifest the very essence of Ceviga’s being; her existence becomes one with her pictorial output. This relationality, verging on a rare type of mimesis, dictates Ceviga’s choice of form, colour and subject matter. Her search for the unknowable, understood to be both within sight and yet beyond reach, informs the way she paints and what she paints.

Flavia Frigeri, 「Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of」 , Courtesy The Page Gallery