Photographing the reflections of visitors at exhibition openings through the glass walls of Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, at first sight it seems that Jasminka Končić is following the ancient philosopher’s definition of art as a mere mimesis of the unreadable reflections of reality. By exhibiting the photographed reflections on the walls of the same gallery, and referring to them as paintings, not photographs, she realizes her ambition to create an exhibition of paintings, without having to go through the exhausting process of mastering the painting medium itself. In the process of work, the exhibition of paintings becomes the exhibition of ‘‘Baroque’’ paintings. It seems an impossible task: how to paint a completely new Baroque painting today, without simply making a fake copy? The parallel between Jasminka Končić and Pierre Menard, ‘‘author of the Quijote’’*, is more than obvious. The forging of the whole procedure additionally accentuates the paradox of exhibiting new Baroque works. The ‘‘paintings’’ are exhibited in the ‘‘wrong’’ medium (photography) and at the ‘‘wrong’’ place (a contemporary art gallery). The fact that the photographs are printed on canvas in order to come as close as possible to the painting medium, is only an explicit sign of their artificiality.
The process of transposing old Baroque themes or compositions into a new medium results in their ambiguity. If we read the exhibited works as photographs, we can see them as documents of events that truly happened and recognize in them silhuettes of real people. If we read them as paintings, we will see silhuettes that imitate painted figures of saints, or Baroque portaits. Grotesque ghosts of fragmented personalities are decomposed through the glass – the female saint with the illuminated halo standing below a cross which is, at the same time, the grid of the gallery glass walls. The typical Baroque chiaroscuro is also transformed. The yellow light receives a shade of red in the proccess of digital edit, which contributes to the artificial athmosphere of the already maniristically ambivalent paintings.
Gold-plated ‘‘Baroque’’ frames and dark red painted walls also point to an ambivalent interpretation of the exhibited works. As integral parts of the context surrounding the paintings, they direct the reading of the exhibition in the Baroque key, while at the same time uncovering the impossibility of setting up an authentic Baroque exhibition. In any authentic Baroque painting the frame is always just a frame, but exhibited in a contemporary art gallery it becomes a work of art, just like the object it surrounds. Transforming the frame into fiction creates the shifting of the borders of a painting and expansion of its meaning. Similarly, the Baroque which, as a category of style also implies the framing and interpreting of specific artefacts – is here exhibited as it was itself a work of art. In that way the gallery (the walls, the exhibited objects, the lighting) becomes a place of invention, authorised lying, characteristic of fiction. The glass gallery wall becomes the border of the ontological frame, which devides this fictional space with what is considered real. The exhibited photographs capture the moment of crossing that metaphorical glass border and overlapping of the two spaces devided by it. Standing outside, the artist photographs the people inside, as well as outside the gallery, all of them mediated through the glass, as a hybrid space dissolving the reflections and creating an in-debth perspective.
By recognizing her own reflection, the person observing herself agrees to the fragmentation of personality – a consequence of accepting the paradox of the mirror. Seeing herself where she is not, in the illusion of space, she manages to reconstruct her real position, while her own gaze, projected from a virtual place, discovers her simultaneous absence from the real space. Similarly, the visitor, by entering the gallery space, agrees to the ‘‘as if’’ fiction – illusion which, engendered by the art procedure analogous to that of the mirror, creates multiple levels of reality and produces the doubling of visitors’ identities, enables them to reflect themselves as monumentalized figures in some Baroque painting.
At the opening of Jasminka Končić’s exhibition at Gallery Miroslav Kraljević the visitors are once more trapped into a situation which reflects the very process of its creation. Their faces are again reflected in the glass, and also in the empty golden plates under the ‘‘paintings’’, as they are trying to read the missing captions. Again anaware of their role, they are retelling a predetermined story, already depicted in the exhibits they came to see. The real situation, with equally real people, thus becomes a reflection of the exhibited artworks.
Ana Kršinić-Lozica
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*”Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” trans. James E. Irby, Labyrinths: selected stories and other writings, New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1964.
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Jasminka Končić was born in Zagreb, 09.09. 1973. She graduated from the Graphic department, class of prof. Miroslav šutej, Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in 1997. She works as teaching assistant to professor Ante Tonči Vladislavić at the Faculty of Textile Technology.
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Contact:
jasminka.koncic@kr.htnet.hr
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The realization of the exhibition is supported by the Krapina-Zagorje County
