Katarina Snoj: Attempt on Noise

In the modern world, driven by the insatiable logic of consumption – to possess, to upgrade, to optimise – the individual is constantly addressed with the promise of personal growth. Yet this promise often remains merely superficial, as it does not lead to genuine personal transformation, but instead reproduces existing patterns of subjectivation, rooted in efficiency, competitiveness, and relentless self-management. In such a societal configuration, saturated with information and data, meaning is lost in the noise – the world expands towards quantitative overabundance and semantic emptiness.
Amid concurrent global crises – environmental catastrophe, the disintegration of communities, growing individual alienation, the exhaustion of natural and human resources, as well as the erosion of democratic institutions, the weakening of human rights, and the decline of a critical public sphere – the oversaturation of information has become one of the defining challenges of contemporary life. Since the end of the 20th century, information is no longer a scarce or hard-to-access commodity, but rather a ubiquitous element of everyday life, the economy, and social interaction. Within this new informational paradigm, the individual is exposed to a constant flow of news, notifications, and visual, auditory, and haptic stimuli emerging from both digital and physical environments.
In this context, information oversaturation reveals two interconnected yet analytically distinct problems: the quantitative and the qualitative. The former relates to the mismatch between the volume of incoming information and the recipient’s cognitive capacity; its consequences manifest in diminished attention, poor judgement, loss of focus, and reduced productivity. The qualitative problem, on the other hand, highlights the erosion of meaning: information becomes disconnected, unreliable, redundant, and often instrumentalised. This marks an epistemological shift in which information loses its referential function – it is no longer about conveying knowledge, but about the proliferation of signs that merely simulate meaning.
Such a transformation carries profound cognitive and affective consequences: trust in informational sources deteriorates, the capacity for critical thinking weakens, and the individual increasingly enters a state of mental saturation and overload, in which contemplation – as a prerequisite for reflective distance – becomes nearly impossible.
It is within this reflection on the omnipresent noise and hum of stimuli, which constantly interrupt and fragment the individual’s attention while shaping their perception and experience of the world, that Katarina Snoj positions her practice. The sensory and informational saturation of contemporary life does not merely exert external pressure, but also cultivates a barely perceptible growth of quiet unease, which the artist takes as her conceptual point of departure. Her works do not stem from concretely recognisable mimetic motifs, but from an exploration of the material properties of the painterly surface. Her artistic practice is not rooted in representation, but in a rejection of referentiality – a shift from meaning to sensation, from resemblance to material presence.
Here, the painterly support – the fabric – assumes a central role, actively participating in the creation of the artwork. It undulates, resists the pigments, and does not absorb the paint but rather holds it, repels it, and selectively filters it. The material thus becomes both co-author of the image and its very condition of possibility.
Snoj’s painterly gesture can be understood as a disturbance – an intervention into a system that resists submission to colour and form. In doing so, the artist creates a visual metaphor for an environment saturated with constant stimuli, informational noise, and sensory disruptions. Translucent glazes sink into the fabric’s network of threads, while impasto layers weigh down the surface, compelling it into physical responsiveness. The artist has noted that her work strives to establish a sonic axis of noise – drone – silence, which in her artistic field manifests as an allusion to this spectrum of auditory states. Hence, chromatic saturation becomes an analogue of noise, while emptiness and subtle tonality evoke the potential of silence.
The multilayered and semi-transparent fabric she employs as a painting support functions not only as a material particularity but also as an allusion to the relationship between the visible and the concealed. In a contemporary informational landscape marked by hyperproduction of content and relentless stimulation, the fabric becomes a metaphor for a filtered gaze.
The transparency of the textile and the glazed layers of paint are dependent on perspective, light, and distance. This transparency becomes an allegory of the mechanisms of the infosphere, in which access to essence and meaning is perpetually elusive and veiled. A frontal view reveals the framework of the painting, while a lateral glance obscures it. In this tension between the revealed and the hidden, Snoj establishes a critique of sensory oversaturation, in which stimuli function as a membrane of deceptive clarity. What we receive is often only the surface – a composite of impressions that seldom discloses the underlying structures of influence, control, or ideological construction.
Through her work, Katarina Snoj offers the possibility of visual silence, visual noise, and the fluid spectrum that stretches between the two. Yet even though silence is often understood as a space of calm or contemplation within an environment of constant informational flow and stimulation, it can become burdensome: empty, uncertain, restless. It acts as a space of confrontation with a state that has hitherto been masked by unceasing signals. How paradoxical, then, that temporary silence and the weight of emptiness do not necessarily alleviate oversaturation, but may in fact expose it more starkly and deepen the sense of unease.

Katarina Snoj (b. 2002, Ljubljana) completed her undergraduate studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In addition to painting, she works with installation, printmaking, and photography. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Mala galerija of the Bank of Slovenia, the Media Nox Gallery, DobraVaga, the Museum of Contemporary Art at Metelkova (as part of a workshop led by Aleksandra Vajd), and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum. She has also held two solo exhibitions: one at Cankarjev dom (as part of the Art Critic's Choice Series, curated by Tina Gerlec), and another at the gallery Odprto obrobje. She occasionally works as a curator and art critic. She will continue her postgraduate studies in Gothenburg, Sweden.