When we were discussing the date for the exhibition, Jelena Peric demanded the winter schedule, usually disliked by the artists. The emphasised whiteness of the Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery does not suffice. We settled for February, hoping that by that time all will be covered by snow, which has not fallen by mid January. The characteristics of snow cover, or at least those few hours of its urban existence: the scintillating whiteness, the diffused reflection of light, silenced sounds, the softness and penetrating freshness while breathing; in author’s opinion, these are the characteristics of a surrounding that matches best with the entire perception of the presented drawings.
The unusual concentration on weather conditions and the exhibition on the walls of a gallery cannot be incidental. The above qualities of the freshly fallen snow, are transferred by some physical mechanism from the aesthetics in a nostalgic, slightly story-like concept of ‘a unique true winter atmosphere’, that in a spiritual eye, unlike its astute reality, evokes the warmth of a home, holidays, ski-prints in the snow, the fulfilling completeness of a winter tale… If the author’s wishes come true, during her exhibition we shall be in a snow-drift, and thus the ‘Hidden Drawings’ one step more mysterious. Fewer spectators will see them , and the connection between electromagnetism and Jelena Peric will remain undiscovered.
At first glance the fourteen hidden drawings logically fit into the author’s minimalist variant of abstract geometry. Keeping track with the exhibitions, we got used to connecting her paintings into a whole. The Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery is in itself very flexible, almost plastic in its potential to submit to the power of every clearly defined cycle. The ‘Hidden Drawings’ are made on identical, factory format (29×21 cm) of indigo paper. Set in line, they become the black intermissions of a frieze, which through the interaction with the whiteness of the gallery, imposes the feeling of being a part of a spatial painting. However, the desired integration with the surrounding white of the snow, made possible because of the Gallery’s glass wall, points to the author’s impulse to present the content of the drawings, which goes beyond the usual exhibiting , almost as a classical mode of a need for a confession. Here, the formal starts to intertwine with the psychic.
The indigo faces the audience with its sensitive, therefore glass-protected sur-face. Because of the reflection, all that one sees, is the spectator’s own face. Face on a Face. The patient, the curious, and the ones who believe that there is always something more, will (if standing very close and at a certain angle) manage to see the drawings. The drawings are just a black trace on a black surface of the indigo, the print in a structure – what happens to the outer, snow-white variant when the skis run over it. The found trace will wake the explorer’s instincts. The further insight will cover the completeness of the drawings recognising symbols, simple gadgets, magnetic force lines, the poles… When all the drawings are discovered we can find their thematic and stylistic connection. After spotting the black drawings, already skilful in searching, the spectator will on his way back face the white footprints he left on his way in.
Where does this sudden, however discrete and schematic, shift by Jelena Peric into the world of presentation, come from?
Formal, technical, symbolic and subconscious all are woven in a pretended simple and spontaneous idea of this cycle. At home there was unused indigo paper for copying over, being always the means, and never the goal. Why not transfer the drawing over the matrix paper in the soft greasy surface? Why not make one little life inversion which turns a physicist into an artist? Why not let out the little of that other, hidden pole which through the permanent charge ‘feeds’ the known, public and in one moment chosen I?
How much light to cast on one’s own investigation and how transparent surface should be chosen? Both the artist and the spectator reflect themselves in the drawing: the first one by creation, the other one while watching, but both through emphaty. Reading tracks is a skill of identification which is acquired by long practice. Every approach and all techniques of this exhibition are doubled. They point and distract at the same time. Some of them have already been discussed about. The glass protects the drawings because they are a mere disturbance of the basic structure, which would loose its meaning with any additional touch. The mirror-like reflection makes the reading of a drawing more difficult, pointing to the spectator himself since his reflection is what one sees best. The duplication of the ‘picture’ distracts him also from the question why an artist should copy the enlarged rudimentary schema of children’s’ electric-lab. The glass protects both the drawing and its creator. The duplication of its function makes it an inseparable part of the thing which creates the entire magic of a piece of art, same as the inverted usage has re-positioned the indigo from the means to the performer of the same whole.
The ‘Hidden Drawings’, due to their difficult reading of black on black, are seen as abstract surfaces, and are revealed as drawings just after a persistent looking. Continuing the technique of minimal presence of the author in the painting, Jelena Peric mechanically follows the lines of an enlarged schema, indirectly treading down prints into an industrially prepared and formatised pigment. All the drawings, that are at the same time the abstract and the concrete, the mechanical and the conceptual, the hiding and the revealing; from a small and irrelevant starting point develop into a complex and well orchestrated game that answers with a question to the one who looks at the reflection.
Branko Franceschi
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Jelena Peric was born at St. Petersburg in 1962. Gradueted from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1984. Member of the Painting Workshop HAZU ( Croatian Academy of Science and Arts) in Zagreb from 1984 to 1986. Lives and works in Zagreb.