For the past several years, in one of the niches of the eastern parts of the Diocletian’s Cellars, there is a nameless sarcophagus. It was confirmed that it originates from the 3rd or the 4th century AD This sarcophagus inspired me to make a site specific work for this year’s Adria Art Annale in Split. I wanted to recall a memory of its original function with the least possible intervention. In this nest of human remains, abandoned also by the body, I tried to bring back the essence and the contents.
How to depict a body that is gone? How to mold a soul that had to abandon the body? How to portray all of this for the possible mental perception?
Silence, darkness, the sarcophagus almost filled with water, the halogen bulb in the water – working with minimal sources that awake memories, feelings and imagination, contrary to the usual minimalist accent on the visual perception. By building a fence around the sarcophagus, thus marking the permissible point of observation, I create the theatrical scene and determine the image through which the spectator reconstructs the idea.
Water – the most transparent and the most unreal substance, sacred because of its living necessity and the symbolic possibility of purification, becomes an object through the molecule that was focused and played with, by the heat of the halogen light. Water is never still.
Light and water are one, as are the spirit and the body. Light made water an object, disclosing the aura of its sanctity at the same time.
For the exhibition in Zagreb I used another sarcophagus, dating from the approximately the same period. I placed it in a neutral ambience of the gallery, wishing to create a vision of the same intensity as the described installation from the Diocletian’s Cellars. I transferred it, trying to focus.
Zeljko Marovic
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Zeljko Marovic was born on March 21st 1955 in Split. He graduated painting in the class of Prof. Emilio Vedova at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice in 1988. The same year he was a participant of the Internationale Sommerakademie f¸r Bildende Kunst in Salzburg. Till 1996 lives in New York, working as a professor on the Pedagogy Department ‘Doing Art Together’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since 1997 works at the Department of Painting of the Art Academy in Split.
