Snežana Pečujlija - From the interior to the exterior

Right from the very beginning of this presentation, and upon examining the works exhibited by Snežana Pečujlija in this retrospective exhibition, it can be concluded, considering her attitude towards reality and her continuous dialogue with art, that she instinctively sensed that modern and new, which most artists strive to achieve, are not synonyms and should be conceptually distinguished. This separation in interpretation is deliberate, taking into account that she transformed her pursuit of the new into an expressive visual sensation, in which only her idea is always new, while her artistic practice remained within the traditional frameworks of reaffirmed and redefined expressionism, with elements of gestural painting. She consciously adopts traditional visual elements as tools that, in a new thematic constellation, now acquire a different, original pictorial function, lending the painting legitimacy as an authentic work of art.  

Snežana, through a public demonstration of her artistic strategy, revealed to the cultural public her very personal understanding of the artistic form, which simultaneously allows for multiple interpretations by consciously shifting the semantic depth into the image's depths, giving it multi-directionality and continuity of visually-cognitive surprises. The characteristic of expressive deformation of form in her paintings, defined by visual elements such as line, color, texture, and volume, in a deliberately raw and seemingly awkward pictorial articulation of form within the given thematic structure of the image, has the importance of a different visual language. This 'gentle brutality' or 'artistic awkwardness' emphasizes that the internal conceptual structure, in a semantic sense, holds the same value as the object that is the actual thematic subject of the painting, which is, after all, contained in the very title of the exhibition — 'From the Inner to the Outer', but, we add, also vice versa. 

It is her different path to the image, in terms of the peculiarities of the image's form – the representation and its narratively enigmatic quality, as an expression of her own and authentic living testimony about the world of personal mythology and the formulation of meaning of visual artistic symbols based on the literary foundation of the image.

In addition to painting, at the core of Snow White's metaphorical vocation and intimate experience, whose thematic specificity is shaped by the current issues within the inner structure of the modern person, her second great love—or perhaps her first—is poetry, which she herself creates. Poetry in Snezana's visual action, as an inspiration for all arts, according to some, is closer to the truth and essence of understanding life and the world, represents an inexhaustible source of painterly inspiration, convinced that the artist always carries all her paintings within her verses. She, poetry, affirms emotions that are so close to artists, especially women, and which, through the sensations of artistic transposition into the visual world of the painting, confirm the convincing notion that poetry is most akin to painting, but at the same time, it also grants Snezana the ability to communicate with the audience through various media. Snezana presents herself through her paintings as an artist endowed with intellectual and creative capacity for realizing authentic figurative forms, in which she feels a pronounced approach to the idea of ​​intertwining painting and poetry, as a distinctive visual system that makes an inroad into the unexplored realm of her own soul, as well as the fundamental elements of the plastic structure of the painting. 

Thus, the painterly panorama of reality by Snežana Pečujić, whose thematic focus is on women with all their complexity, has a distinctly subjective character, with a very rich register of raw colors and the deconstruction of fragmented parts of the contour form acting as if a flood of intensely emotional paint has been poured onto the canvas. Her painterly visualization implicitly suggests an artistic embodiment of women as representatives of their time, who, contrary to superficial appearances, delve deeply into the intimate inner space of female being.

Mile Ignjatović

In Novi Sad, 15 June 2026.