"Nina Sumarac’s work is often a cross between Fantastic art and Neo-surrealism. She skillfully combines illustrative and photographic elements into her paintings, in order to explore the imagination, the bizarre and the grotesque, depicting myths and legends. At the same time exploring the complex and compound symbolic imagery of subconscious visions interlaced with ordinary materialistic objects.

In her work called "Young Weather vs The Last Beast", Sumarac uses symbolism to portray imminent disaster, calamity, and tragedy with an extraordinary breadth of prophetic conception. She personifies these adversities in the form of an ogre representing a horde of people - which according to popular belief - a crowd is also considered as something odd, something pathological and something monstrous. Staring at one direction, they seem to have heightened suggestibility. There is that sense of totalitarianism, especially since the crowd is patterned in such a way that it can gain direct power at any moment by acting collectively.

​The ogre seems to represent “the shadow archetype”, which is of suppressed thoughts, weaknesses, needs, impulses and restrictions. This archetype, as described by Carl Jung, is the darker side of the psyche, representing chaos, disorder, and the unknown. As such, the type of irrationality attributed to this ogre is mostly apprehension. Faced by an emergency situation, such as any kind of natural disasters, he is expected to suddenly behave like a selfish animal, trampling others in the scramble to escape. The motifs associated with him, the twin horns, the loose screw, the dark apocalyptic sky above his head, the wounded bird on his shirt, and the clenched fist tattooed on his arm, depict the current qualms of the world we live in. As such, the work investigates, or rather ridicules, the precarious balance and the possibility of collapsing of old ideologies and belief systems; in Richard J. Hooper’s exact word, “an apocalyptic drama -- destruction, the coming of a messiah, the judgment of humanity, and the ushering in of a new world."

​Tatiana Ferahian  (MLS)

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