Maja Pušić Čerić

The artistic imagination of Maja Pušić Čerić is inhabited by rather peculiar sea creatures. Oversized fish in stylized and clearly seen contours and intensive colours take effect of a surface and present tabulae rasae of its kind on which Maja writes interesting tales. Graphic media of linocut in colour, which she uses, bears no precise lines and fine modulation and it therefore corresponds to Maja's sensibility in terms of her rapid, almost calligraphic writing.
Motives of the Mediterranean cities, ships set out to the open sea, trains or animals are descriptive to the smallest detail, and yet they seem like impressions caught in one breath, best testifying to Maja's drawing skills. Inside the contours of some sea giant the observer's attention moves from one miniature to another, from one harbour to another, from the shining sun to the flying bird, and he starts to participate in this microcosm with his own perception of space and time.
Simplicity and conciseness of expression reduce the motives to the the level of symbols so that the application of Latin or calligraphic letters one cannot interprete arbitrarily, but as an evocation of Oriental artistic concept – a joint of a picture and a sign as equivalent esthetic forms.
Primeval inhabitants of the sea in Maja's work are fraught with common places of the Mediterranean civilization, on their surface they have accumulated every experience of a man who is inseparably linked to the sea. They voyage, as in the Old Testament story of Noah's Arc, like separate worlds.

BIOGRAPHY