On making first acquaintance with the painting of Goranka Vrus - and I use the word «painting» as a general term that can also apply to the artist's extraordinary achievements in the making of arrases one immediately finds oneself faced with a problem. One sees that one has to do more than to come to the overly simple conclusion that this work belongs to the field of lyrical abstraction: in fact it does, but that perception doesn't go far enough. Looking carefully, one always discovers a kind of resistance in the way the artist works, rather as though she insists on refusing to let herself go to the pleasure of the pure song of pure color. Even though Goranka Vrus deploys a complex sense of chromatic harmony in her work, she charges it as well with a strong sense of temporality, or of simple existence. There's a flavor of something biological in her paintings - and most particulary in her range of vivid, pulsating reds - rather as though we find ourselves faced with the birth and subsequent deliquescence of a life. So there's a presence of something solid, even pained, and therefore irreducible to the felicity of «pure painting».
To limit ourselves to the visual pleasure of these colors that both condense and dissolve, or of these surfaces that also shape themselves into autonomous worlds of color, would be to risk losing sight of the most intimate substance of this art, which is in fact a complex metaphor of nothing less than existence, inextricably suffused with thought and emotion.
This, then, is why I began by talking about finding myself in the presence of a problem. The deciphering of Goranka Vrus' art is a necessarily complex operation and one enters a kind of labyrinth where paths both tremulous and heady make it difficult to distinguish the concretions pauses and filaments in which drives, lyrical imulse and subjectivity form a connection to a fact, to some tendentially objective image, or, in short, to some sort of anthropomorphic reference.
But some of the works seem certainly to come quickly to our aid, presenting themselves more openly to our attention and therefore giving us a kind of key that allows us to enter the world of the artist's imagination.
 Two works, for example, clearly represent a fall, or a falling, and are just as clearly to be thought of as two realizations of the same idea: a figure that we immediately intuit to be feminine because of the line that outlines the legs and just barely hints the breasts smashes down violently against a black plane. The upper part of the bust, with the shoulders and head, disappears behind (or transforms itself into) a blotch of red and green that irresistably gives an impression of flowers, or, more specifically, of roses, as though to affirm that suffering and death, in at least this case, are forces that generate new life and new beauty. Surrounding this «fall», blots, tracings and filaments scem to want to give greater strength and visibility to this idea of impact and to do so in terms of a figurative technique not at all distant from something that children find it natural and spontaneous to use: something, moreover, and quite curiously, that contains a tone both of the candid and the complicated. Or we have another example, and again in two variants or modulations of the same idea: a vaguely anthropomorphic figure - but more visibly so in one case and in the other with a blotch of color that seems more to reher to the idea of an insect, or to some organic structure in a state of self-modification, or even perhaps of putrefaction - juxtaposes itself to a plane that gives the scansion of a chromat space divided into four sectors. The painting undoubtedly affirms itself for reasons intrinsic to its own autonomous vitality, and to the vibrant force of its texture, but I still continue to feel that this interweaving of colors assumes the fullness of its value only in relationship to the central forms, and to the way they carry a sense of something vaguely anthropomorphic. This, in fact, is what gives the web of colors a definition as a background; it allows it a structure that harbingers a possible meaning, and can thus be said, quite accurately, to make it visible.
What always gives this work its meaning and a constant renewal of access to real vitality is some sort of reference to biological life.
This applies as well to the works where Goranka Vrus' technique is weaving rather than painting. Here again, nothing could be more mistaken than to think of her arrases in terms of pure chromatic hedonism. And we have to remember- even to insist - that the translation of painterly ideas into a medium of woven cloth can interfere with what they were originally intended to be.  Working with paints and brushes, an artist can catch an intimation of something vibrant and carnal, and this is not easily reproduced in an arras, even when constant attempts are made to draw the weaving towards its maximum possible vitality.
But Goranka Vrus is remarkably successful, in the sense that she seems to get as close as one might imagine possible to the vitality of her original ideas, even though it still remains true that the arras must necessarily block and immobilize them, at least to some slight degree. This is really to say, however, that the work would tend towards the decorative if the generative impulse behind it were weaker than in fact it is, and if the work weren't in possession of a true interior light with which to react to the dampenings that have to come about because of the very nature of the materials in which the artist is casting her forms. And what actually happens in the work of Goranka Vrus seems a part of a totally inverse process: the arras seems to distance from something that may have been too contingent, too much a question somehow of daily life, or too immediately the expression of an impulse in the original oil painting. Something slight or impermanent may sometimes remain present in the paintings, only then to disappear when the painting is translated into arras, or even to assume a sense of necessity that it previously lacked and that comes to the fore by virtue of qualities inherent in the new medium itself.
It hardly seems necessary to prove this statement by citing specific examples. It ought to be enough, on the one hand, to note how closely the motifs of the arrases and the paintings approach one another, and, on the other, to plumb the sense of duration that they assume in their woven versions, even though maintaining a conspicuously high level of a sense of existential truth. One thinks for example of certain extremely beautiful arrases where motifs of what looks like vegetation intertwine with others that appear to be biological, all coming together into a saga of colors marked by exceptional vitality.
It's a saga where the colors that most assert and impose their presence are the reds and blacks, convincingly presenting themselves as both natural and mental, primordial and symbolic, instinctive and reflexive, just as might be said, moreover,  of all of Goranka Vrus' work.
In terms of the number, quality, and chnical commitment of the works on display, I'm sure that this show in Pordenone will become an essential point of reference for all concerned - for the organizers, the critics, and the public, but most of all for Goranka Vrus herself.