More interesting than the search for common denominator in the work of the three graduate students of the Academy of the Fine Arts in Zagreb, who may have already articulated their expression into the recobnizability, is the detection of differences since the fumbling of one’s own path in the vast space of equal iconographic, genre or formal discourseis not an easy task. However, the semblance of some mutual “unbearable ease” or airy optimism is suggested. Deducible from youth maybe or more likely subsisting as acontinuation of the generation that gave up the high principles and tracking of definitive truths, the authors and their generation favour playing with the clishés or applying simple solutions not lacking humour and ludism in the eager, exploratoryapproach to the media.
Alem Korkut presents his world of celestial bodies, natural phenomena and elements through polished arpesque shapes which are, in spite of their fluid contents(“Fog”, “Fire”), always structured into stable entireties. In shaping and in the use of colour, instead of mimetic or metonymic volition, his tendency towards simple archetypal conceptions and poetic pre-speach is evident. Silver and white Moon has twenty eight thorns and golden -yellow Sun hasfour rays. The choice of symbolic “additions” is running on the ludistic level rather than calling for the revelation of cosmic secrets. The colour, although creating poetical illusion, is not a non compromising addition because under its transparent cover the structure of wood is still “readable”; thus, Korkut is safely back on the firm ground: he discloses his procedure and instructs of his favourable materials and modes of creation.
With his own”protected spaces” Hrvoje Dukez is, in the true spirit of new-age, defending himself from the swoon of agressive technological proposals for the idealization of the world. Dukez’s congenial starting vistaspresume the “diminution”1 of uncomprehensibily entangled world as it is. In Dukez’s case these are diary notes, intimating of images which he decomposes in his own code. In his previous graphic opus the condensed form (island) transformed into the sign has the same value as the scattered gesture which suggests the atmosphere. By the choice of the media that gives new possibilities, Dukez transfers the motive of the island inequally distilled fragment, while the atmosphere creating dispersed gesture is replaced by the colour and the whiteness of the graphic paper by the whiteness of the wall. To favour reductive and disciplined expression does not mean surrending to superiority of geometrical strictness. Dukez avoids any form of imposed regularity even when the frame is concerned. He opens it or curves, stubbornly fighting with freezing immobility of thepicture. The enformel matterness of the pictorial substance which Dukez creates according to his own technology – mixture of bee wax and natural pigments – he controls with disciplined gesture. His newest objects from the outside look like tropical fruits, hide starlike structures which are later relativised in the game of the reflections produced by irregular mirrors. The utopian search for the wholeness within and of the fragments develops from the constant dynamic tension between square and circle,uncovered simplicity and hidden complexity, chaos and disciplined effort to restitute the authors own rules of order.
As the colour of absence and transition from visible to invisible, white is denoted as the colour of the lunar, cold, female world. Snowy tenderness of femininity is revealed by the choice of soft and fragile materials: cotton,wool, crêpe, styrofoam, veil and thread. In the work of Ivana Franke whiteness is not an unifying principle forced from theoutside, but the decision to start from zero level; a zen approach that opens empty spaces of silence in which it ispossible to animate the openess for listening to the most tranquil occurrences that appear in determined rithmycal regularities. Whether the question be of a close-up view (associations of sprouting) or from a far (processions of people)or more monulental sculptorial act congenial to Robert Moriss’s textile witticismes, patience in workmanship that is most evidentin persistent making of paper rolls, is in a kind of merry and equanimous collision with the propensity to choose improvised, porous materials.
Radmila Iva Jankovic ,
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1/ “die Verkleinerung”, Idoll undIdylle. Dietmar Kamper, Unmogliche Gegenwart
2/ The Dictionary of Symbols, Nakladni zavodMH, 1983.
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Hrvoje Dukez was born in 1972 in Zagreb. He isa 4th year student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Prof. Duro Seder. He lives in Zagreb, Vrapcanska draga 38, tel. 01/155 331.
Ivana Franke
Ivana Franke was born in 1973 in Zagreb. She graduates from the School for Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb. At present she is a 4th year student of the Graphic Department atthe Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Prof. Miroslav Sutej. She lives in Zagreb, Krizaniceva 11 a, tel. 01/4551 585.
Alem Korkut
Alem Korkut was born in 1970 in Travnik. He is a 4th year student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Prof. Sime Vulas. He lives in Zagreb, A. Stipancica 17,tel. 01/319 447.
