The first painting of Strmol Between Night and Day Series, Noravisionsolar paintings plays Hommage to eccentric lady Ksenija Hribar, portrayed with her Aligator is taking a posture of Da Vinci's Dame with Hermine.
The painting is a part of the Strmol series Between Night and Day, Noravisionsolar, painted on used solar panels, exposed at Strmol castle in August 2022.
It stands as Hommage to Rado Hribar (1905–1944) and Ksenija Gorjup Hribar (1905–1944), owners of Strmol Castle, abducted and murdered In January 1944, by the Partisans in the forest at Mače. The castle was confiscated by the communist government after the war. A demand for restitution of the property was lodged in 1992 and the castle was returned to the heirs in 2004. The bodies of Rado Hribar and Ksenija Gorjup Hribar were found in December 2015 above the village of Mače.
"Between Night and Day" was a multidisciplinary event by artist Norma De Saint Picman, initially inspired by Slovenian writer Drago Jančar's novel 'I Saw Her That Night', documentary photos of the Hribar Family, interwoven by the link with her personal story and of her Family.
The artist is reading some of her poems and excerpts of books, mixed with piano improvisations, in the "Piano Salon" of the Castle; the performance starts in the "Golden Salon", equipped with Murano Glass luster, splendid mirror and Titian's copy with the singing of old Slovenian song "Kaj ti je deklica ...", loved by the heroine of the novel...The four paintings - three portraits of the couple ( Ksenija, Rado, double portrait) and the tryptique "The shoot" are installed in the outside Green lobby of the Strmol Castle, where the performance actually starts. The literary part of the event is purely left to the author's emotional interpretation of the historical past via documentary photos transcripted into paintings on solar panels, accompanied by some of her and her father's writings and poems. The whole idea is of transferring certain emotions, linked with our unconditional longing for Eternal Love, Freedom, and Mercy regardless to the cruelty of War, Betrayal, and jealousy, through the missing part of the heroine's feminine expression. The tiny link between Love and Death, the transformation of jealousy turned Love into Betrayal, a hidden admiration from a domestic staff towards a cultivated eccentric Lady Veronika, who walked her Aligator via Ljubljana's promenade, riding a car, and motorcycle, and piloting a plane from Ljubljana to Strmol, broken through his fake announcement of her as Gestapo's Mistress.
"As my Family from the paternal and maternal side was also negatively affected by the war as well as the post-war behaviors the Story deeply attracted me, and the fact of confrontation of a cultivated couple with on the one side rural and on the other politically impregnated environment. But I would never ever imagined the fact that happened, in August 2022, as working on the main tryptic, the blood, in a symbolic way pouring from the breast of one of the main characters, leaned on the North side of the studio building, got another physical equivalent in reality on the West side.
Thy Symbol of a Gun, so frequently present on the Hribar's photos has been symbolically manifested through my Family's past, in a way that nobody could have ever imagined."