{"id":104688,"date":"2026-07-17T14:17:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/104688\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T14:17:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:17:45","slug":"maja-ruznic-who-tastes-fire-and-cannot-speak-contemporary-fine-arts-basel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/104688\/","title":{"rendered":"Maja\u00a0Ruznic\u00a0“Who\u00a0Tastes\u00a0Fire and\u00a0Cannot\u00a0Speak”\u00a0Contemporary Fine Arts \/ Basel |"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I arrive in Basel\u2019s old town,\u00a0on\u00a0my\u00a0way\u00a0to Maja Ruznic\u2019s solo exhibition\u00a0\u201cWho Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak\u201d\u00a0at Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery, I\u2019m stopped by an\u00a0unexpected\u00a0sight:\u00a0some\u00a0thirty-odd men, young and old, dressed in full\u00a0traditional\u00a0Alpine\u00a0attire, seated at a long table outside a restaurant, each facing a pint of beer, singing softly together. The heatwave currently\u00a0pushing\u00a0the city to record highs\u00a0makes\u00a0me\u00a0momentarily\u00a0question\u00a0what\u00a0I\u2019m seeing. Each man delicately\u00a0slips\u00a0between chest and head voice as arpeggios dissolved into one another, never quite beginning, never quite ending. It was less like a group chanting than light refracting through moving water.\u00a0Pulled\u00a0out\u00a0of my harmony-induced trance, I\u00a0realize\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0stumbled\u00a0upon\u00a0the 32nd\u00a0Jodlerfest, the Swiss festival that\u00a0brings\u00a0thousands of\u00a0yodelers, alphorn\u00a0blowers\u00a0and flag throwers into the city\u2019s winding\u00a0streets\u00a0\u2014\u00a0an event Basel\u00a0hasn\u2019t\u00a0hosted since 1924.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cWho Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak.\u201d Installation view at Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel, 2026. Photography by Gina Folly. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel\/ Berlin. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic.<\/p>\n

Upon reaching my destination, ten medium-to-small oil paintings, freshly made by\u00a0Ruznic,\u00a0await\u00a0me. Most of the figures are\u00a0rendered\u00a0through what feels like an intentionally meandering brush, shapes superimposed with an improvisational attitude that leaves the canvas\u00a0at\u00a0once\u00a0flat\u00a0and\u00a0compressed. Human and animal-like forms hint at each other rather than resolve, bleeding together instead of standing apart,\u00a0slipping\u00a0endlessly between background and foreground. The effect is heightened by thin paint applied in rough, blotchy, repetitive strokes. Brushwork\u00a0that suggests\u00a0restless\u00a0movement while letting the richly saturated pigment show through in layers\u00a0with\u00a0an\u00a0intensity\u00a0no\u00a0reproduction can really capture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cWho Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak.\u201d Installation view at Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel, 2026. Photography by Gina Folly. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel\/ Berlin. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Girl Who Swallowed the Wolf, 2026. Oil on linen. 177.8 \u00d7 127 cm. Photography by Brian John. Courtesy Karma, New York and Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel \/ London. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic. <\/p>\n

With\u00a0more\u00a0yodeling\u00a0drifting in from outside, I find myself circling an old artists\u2019\u00a0reckoning:\u00a0music seems to possess an ancestral\u00a0capacity\u00a0to move us more\u00a0immediately\u00a0than the visual arts, especially in forms that don\u2019t lean on the technological polish our eyes and ears now expect. In the endless contest among media for sensual superiority, we demand far more of painting than we do of music, which appears to render the cavernous depths of feeling with an almost effortless\u00a0precision,\u00a0whereas\u00a0visual art, however accomplished,\u00a0seems\u00a0forever\u00a0to\u00a0fall\u00a0just short of\u00a0that\u00a0immediacy. We\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0feel\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0\u201creading\u201d\u00a0music the way we feel\u00a0we\u2019re\u00a0reading a painting\u00a0\u2014\u00a0even though music\u2019s directness is\u00a0arguably no\u00a0more innate than painting\u2019s\u00a0(being\u00a0a set of conventions and listening habits absorbed so completely they now pass for nature). If music\u2019s advantage is that it\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0represent, then painters chasing that same immediacy have historically stripped representation away too\u00a0\u2014\u00a0abstraction as the visual arts\u2019\u00a0answer to the same ache, often built within philosophical systems that gave artists color theories, geometries,\u00a0and\u00a0cosmologies to work from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Who Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak, 2026. Oil on linen. 177.8 \u00d7 127 cm. Photography by Brian John. Courtesy Karma, New York and Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel \/ London. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic. <\/p>\n

\"\"The Making of a Gallbladder, 2026. Oil on linen. 177.8 \u00d7 127 cm. Photography by Brian John. Courtesy Karma, New York and Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel \/ London. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic. <\/p>\n

Ruznic\u2019s\u00a0own route\u00a0is psychological, closer to s\u00e9ance\u00a0than to doctrine. Her figures surface unbidden,\u00a0three-quarters\u00a0formed, arriving from a childhood in wartime Bosnia spoken of obliquely, filtered through\u00a0a\u00a0long-standing interest in Jungian analysis and the idea that painting can function as a kind of active imagination, a place where the unconscious is allowed to draw itself. <\/p>\n

\"\"Self Portrait as Memory, 2026. Oil on linen. 50.8 \u00d7 45.7 cm. Photography by Brian John. Courtesy Karma, New York and Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel \/ London. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic. <\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cWho Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak.\u201d Installation view at Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel, 2026. Photography by Gina Folly. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel\/ Berlin. \u00a9 Maja Ruznic.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no cosmology behind these canvases, no fixed vocabulary of\u00a0color\u00a0or geometry to decode;\u00a0instead\u00a0there\u00a0is\u00a0a trust in the hand\u2019s\u00a0own drift, in staining and wiping and reworking until a face\u00a0(or the ghost of one)\u00a0seems to arrive on its own terms.\u00a0Perhaps\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0why the work resists settling into either representation or abstraction: it\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0chasing music\u2019s directness through a system, but through something more like listening\u00a0\u2014\u00a0waiting for an image the way\u00a0one\u00a0might\u00a0wait for a melody to resolve, knowing it might not.\u00a0Like\u00a0the\u00a0yodeling\u00a0outside\u00a0still\u00a0refusing\u00a0to quite begin or end,\u00a0Ruznic\u2019s\u00a0figures are doing much the same\u00a0in paint: hovering in the half-sung, half-said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As I arrive in Basel\u2019s old town,\u00a0on\u00a0my\u00a0way\u00a0to Maja Ruznic\u2019s solo exhibition\u00a0\u201cWho Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak\u201d\u00a0at Contemporary Fine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[77,22223,51465,51466],"class_list":["post-104688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basel","tag-basel","tag-cfa-basel","tag-diogo-pinto","tag-maja-ruznic"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116935750308834639","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}