Being familiar with the paintingof Ljubomir Perčinlić and in particular that segment of it, being one decade old, the significance of which is sensibility and bodylessness of line, half-transparency and ethereal quality of colour as well as fragility of network and screen, in which the human vibration of the author’s hand reflects itself as an earthquake in the structure similar to an imagery of “the brain’s storm” on an encephallogram, the Perčinlić’ssculpture, observed through such a “network of remembrances” distinguishes itself to be rather robust, rough and even wild. However, that the first distinction is nothe final one, and even not the first-rate one, the relating author’s characteristic of the explicit reverence to the substance is convincing us hereby. How much he respects in his painting the delicious appearance and vanishing of the line, measured and reduced chromatic relations, so much he revenes particularly in his iron sculptures the superior condition of the weight, by means of which they press down upon the base. In addition to this, such a “stabile possibility” is intensified by the construction constant of the laid down somehow “landed rectangular parallele piped” from which irregular, strong sprouts rise fort. In its foundation the heavy, stable Perčinlić’ sculpture possesses a decisiveness of occupying the space and the duration in it, whereby from the compact mass of its compressed, rectangular parallele piped shape’s condensed energy the sprouts of a clear and expressive power sprout forth with the architectural tendency of a”Being tending to set up vertically”.
More stimulating than trying to decipher whether the attributives of the “manlike corporality” are in question, is the author’s simultaneous dealing with an dim edge zone between the irregularly geometrized and geometrically organic, that is, his beloved mental habis to bring by stable provoking the confinium of the opposite pairs (such as geometrical and organic, part and whole, stable and unstable) to a point of the doubt their boundaries and their blendings. But, this is actually a procedure of doubled coding with a possibility of reading-out in different directions. If were call the amazing effects of water-colour vibrations in Perčinlić’s painter’s nets, actually produced by anintervention with a sharp graphite point or even a scalpel, it does not mean that his sculpture owes anything to his painting, but that paradoxical contrariety in the nature of procedure is present and identical when on his browned iron sculptures appearthe effect of a smoothly tightened skin, but also when in the cuts of edges a fine cinnamon-like corrosion powder is provoked.
If it conveys the properties of arobust weight, Perčinlić’s sculpture simultaneously shows also the versatile transformations of epidermis within the range from smooth monoliths and highly polished elaborated superficies, overcutting-out insertions and multi-part sheet iron joints in someworks, and all the way to their porpous corrosiveness and dilapidation, dematerialization of tissue into powder, i.e. acertain entrophy.
The author’s harmonious building-up in various media warrants primarily a comprehensive unfying general attitude, a consistent view of the world, repeatedly reminded of by his oil-paintings of the 60’s with landscapes composed like a puzzle. The essential components of these landscapes with chromatically distinguished “cultivated fields” cut-in into the landscape show amazing similarities with the profiles of Perčinlić’s sculptures. In a contrary imagined act of cutting-out such “cultivated fragments” from the author’s landscapes, there appear an elementary form of his sculpture. There is no doubt that in Perčinlić’s system of plastic thinking there has been laid balanced and unifying principle which simply represents his “model of the world” as a multi-layered as much as also a multi-directionally functioning whole, which is best proved by an easiness of transferability of this model from the sphere of painting into that of sculpturing, and in the opposite direction.
Spomenka Nikitović
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Ljubomir Percinlic
Born 1939 in Zenica. Graduated from The Academyof Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1996 in the class of Nedeljko Gvozdenovic. He is a full-time professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. He is a member of the Croatian Association ofthe Visual Artists. Lives and works in Zagreb.
