Throughout her opus, and especially with this series of pictorial compositions, this established artist presents herself as a serious thinker and conceptual narrator of her own preoccupations, emotions and ideas. At least three elements dominate its expression: empty space painting, the surrealist tone of architectural space, and conceptualism as a form of expression. Aleksandra Petrushevska Ristovska primarily understands art as an intuitive and experiential understanding of life. She prefers to emphasize some specific relations of human life such as the meaning of weakness over strength, femininity over masculinity, the space between things rather than on themselves. In such a context of understanding, this y oung but experienced author concentrates on pushing the boundaries of empty space, or, as a Chinese philosophical proverb puts it, “keeping the ultimate silence.” The final connotation is that empty space is actually the beginning of countless things and that makes it fundamental. Thus, her treatment of empty space is that it is a solid space, a space with its own forms and shapes. In this kind of art, empty space is expected to convey information through the very lack of figurations. The sizes and contours of the empty shapes create rhythm and unity. Solid shapes give meaning to the empty, and vice versa. These empty spaces are often represented in the visual arts through the forms of cloud, fog, sky, water or smoke, but in the opus of Aleksandra Petrushevska Ristovska the empty interior architectural space is emphasized. Exactly this element of interior representation of the space is the second element in the work of Aleksandra Petrushevska Ristovska which is articulated in an unusual surrealistic way.It is interesting to note that Surrealist artists have always been fond of architecture - especially the interior. Fleeing the disturbing and hyper-realistic “ideal cities” of the Renaissance, Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico created haunting dream-like scenes, urban spaces inhabited by neoclassical structures, sculptures and medieval fortresses. Belgian painter Rene Magritte also transformed the architecture of everyday life into confusing symbolic images. Of course, the author of these compositions had this in mind, especially if it is known that she combines visual art with literature, philosophy and art theory.This means that the procedure first goes into defining the area of work in a conceptual sense, and then the composition is elaborated in different forms of artistic expression. Conceptual projects are built on the premise of the role of architecture in everyday life in dynamic correlation with the theory of surrealism in which the artist Aleksandra Petrushevska Ristovska argues for the importance of dynamic communication between object, space and human existence. It uses pieces of furniture and various single or folded spaces, denoting their materiality with a slight emphasis on the structure itself and voluminousness, which are hyperrealistically presented. Her narrative is therefore close to that of Austrian-American architect Frederick Kessler, who says that “sculpture, painting, architecture should not be used as wedges to separate our experience of art and life; “they are here to be interconnected and to connect Dream and Reality.” In the context of such a doctrine, the original internal structures, placed in different perspectives, evolve into stable subject volumes. Something similar, in the manner of Dali, De Chirico and Magritte, the authorAleksandra Petrushevska Ristovska tries to create a configuration that will make the interior space a kind of psychological landscape. Thus, as the final
consequence in her painting is all the elements of her compositions to be designed poetically in order to manifest the importance of the basic living and working spaces.