The cycle of faces on crumpled paper was created mainly around 1987 and 1988, with several continuations in the early 1990s. Its essential innovation is not only the expressive deformation of the face but the transformed status of the support. Paper is no longer flat and passive. Folds, protrusions, cracks and real shadows become active parts of the image.

The face therefore seems not to have been placed upon the surface but wrested from it. Brushwork breaks across folds, paint gathers in depressions, and contour either follows or resists the accidental topography of the sheet. The material behaves like skin: vulnerable, wrinkled and scarred. Individual likeness recedes before a frontal mask defined by almond-shaped eyes, an elongated nose, compressed mouth and broad fields of colour.

The gaze is the psychological centre of the cycle. The eyes are often elongated, differently directed or almost animal, so the figure is not a passive object of observation but a presence that returns the viewer’s gaze. The series does not stop at the head: the logic of the face extends into the neck, chest and whole body, and then into animal and hybrid figures. The crumpled papers thus connect portraiture, the nude, animal imagery and late mythological imagination. Their power lies in the balance between control and chance, recognisable image and a material that continually threatens its stability.

In the faces on crumpled paper, Pristavec’s painting confronts material resistance directly. The sheet is transformed into relief before the first stroke, so the image develops through a dialogue between artistic decision and an unpredictable network of folds.

An artist’s development contains moments when a change of support is not a technical detail but a transformation of the image’s entire logic. Pristavec’s works on crumpled paper belong to such a moment. Paper that was physically crushed and subsequently reopened no longer possesses neutral flatness. Its surface is filled with events produced before painting begins: a network of folds, depressions, ridges, and unpredictable fractures. The artist therefore confronts not an empty white field but an already formed terrain. The painted mark must follow, emphasise, oppose, or otherwise negotiate that terrain.

This decision is fundamental because it releases the image from complete control. On smooth paper, a painter can precisely determine the course of a line and the evenness of a chromatic field; on a crumpled support, paint catches on ridges, skips depressions, thickens within cracks, or spreads unexpectedly. The deformation visible in the face is consequently not only the result of graphic stylisation. It is partially produced by the support itself. The face fractures because the paper fractures; skin is furrowed because the ground is furrowed. Material and motif merge into a single corporeality.

Crumpled paper must be viewed almost sculpturally. Although the works remain two-dimensional, the surface is no longer optically uniform. Folds cast minute shadows, ridges catch the light, and the layer of paint either stresses or conceals the relief. The viewer perceives not only a painted face but also the physical fact of the sheet. The image possesses skin in a more literal sense than a painting on a smooth ground: wrinkled, vulnerable, hardened in places, and scarred.

This material skin is particularly effective in the faces. Forehead, cheeks, eyelids, and neck are not modelled by soft transitions of light but by uneven topography. A fold in the paper may become a facial furrow, the edge of a nose, a line of the mouth, or the boundary between light and dark zones of the head. The artist does not illustrate ageing or injury, yet the surface automatically introduces a sense of time and woundedness. Even youthful or sexually indeterminate faces appear to have undergone physical pressure.

The surviving body of work’s opening reproductions are constructed around a frontal or slightly turned head occupying almost the entire surface. They cannot, however, be understood as portraits in the conventional sense. Individual likeness, social identity, and the psychological characterisation of a particular sitter are reduced. What remains are the basic signs of a face: large eyes, an elongated or sharply triangular nose, mouth, hair, or a framing contour of the head. Rather than impoverishing the face, this reduction transforms it into an intense mask.

Mask does not necessarily refer here to an object or a direct citation of a particular ritual tradition. It describes primarily a pictorial condition in which the face has become frontal, enclosed, symmetrically or near-symmetrically organised, and removed from everyday time. When the eyes are almond-shaped and the lips compressed into a dark line, the face does not narrate an event but establishes a presence. The viewer does not observe a person in action but confronts the sign of a human or partly human being.

Eyes are the most stable and simultaneously the most unsettling sign in the series. They are frequently elongated, outlined in dark blue or black, and filled with white, yellow, or pale blue. The pupil may become a thin vertical slit, giving the face a feline, reptilian, or entirely alien quality. Elsewhere the eye is empty or nearly closed. These differences are small but decisively alter the psychological effect.

Pristavec’s faces do not solicit empathetic recognition. Their gaze is frequently sideways, distrustful, or divided: one eye addresses the viewer while the other withdraws. Asymmetry produces a sense of inner split. The figure is before us yet not fully available. Large eyes do not signify openness; they may act as defensive organs that control space and return the viewer’s look.

The cycle is decisive because it changes the way the figure is conceived. The face is no longer a completed contour on a neutral support but an unstable field between mask, skin, sign and material event. From this experience emerge the later figures, animals and mythological hybrids.