If we agree with Nicolas Bourriaud’s often upheld statement which outlines the thesis that relevant contemporary art is directed towards the production of social models and interpersonal relationships, that its relational potential is established amidst artist’s consideration in the field of social interaction and its social context (sooner then in the establishment of independent and individual, private symbolic space or the art work) or that the art work presents a specific social interspace hence developing a political project, trying to shift itself into the position of relational action by pondering and pointing it out as its subject, it could be interesting to ask ourselves – if we choose recent works realized as completed objects that create their own discourse with help of a private system of signs and associations – what is the extent to which these works are active within the mentioned categories and in what measure the mentioned is intentional? Bourriaud emphasizes that we have the right to query every aesthetic production whether an art work allows us to take part in the dialogue, whether we can conceive our existence and in which way, within the semantic space which that work defines. Besides, Bourriaud uses the term semionaut, denoting a contemporary artist as an operator who “invents trajectories between signs”
The common characteristic of the works chosen for this exhibition – besides those immediately noticeable at formal level as the monodimensional quality of paintings, the domination of figurative expression and its combination with text – can be established regarding the procedure of connecting different and incoherent semantic elements on the paintings’ surfaces. Every artist proceeds in his own manner and with his own aims to bridge over the spaces between the signs. Yet these artists undoubtedly visualize a multitude of individual systems of thought that are – regarding any social reality – impossible to virtually perceive as a whole. On the other hand, it is most certain that the manipulation with the visual order of painting results in the effect of controlled perception and that the aspects of the unconscious in the paintings are presented in very deliberately. However, the associativity resulting from connecting the semantically divergent visual codes and uncoordinated visual elements, opens to the viewer a space where to form an individual dialogue with the work.
While most directly referring to the social arena and most directly outlining his individual attitude towards the society, Marko Caušic combines a double image of social reality – projected fiction and documentary. His paintings, realized by the visual code of trafic signs, with their forms and dimensions directly outline the context of urban space. Caušic combines the text which denotes observation and, less legible, distortion with visually simplifed images/outlines of an imaginary city; hyperdimensioned antennae and human figures “observing” an architectural model-project; thus he questions by associativity the relations between an individual and the connoted social environment. While appropriating the images and codes of popular culture and, to some extent, the aesthetics of the posters of the social realism, he defines his attitude towards the social space in the explicitly anti-utopian manner. In the video image on the screen – actually a series of photographs with silent background – the artist strikes a pose in the real space of the city to which he refers in his paintings. Anything visible on the screen is not, however, a registration of the artist’s personal identity, but a fragment of the mirror surface reflecting his stare. The mirror functions as a mediator as well as a metaphor; it directs the attention to the observation as the representation to ourselves as well as of ourselves: the personal identity is virtually covered with, mostly two-dimensional and abstract, reflecting image of the outer world. The process potentially lasts forever, but fortunately – as Caušic documents with some photographs – the observed object changes depending on different slants.
Tihomir Matijevic, on the other hand, in the utopian manner insists on his own idiosyncrasy, eccentricity and misfitness, thus creating paintings of megalomaniac dimensions on which he develops the co-ordinates of some parallel universe, defined by the chosen and, for the artist, valuable experiences of reality. The specific aesthetics of comics which he uses with almost log-like dynamics in accumulation of drawings, results in the effect of psychedelic sensation achieved by the multitude of information which he uses to re-interpret the reality or as a “futile endeavour to draw the whole world”. If we move away from the painting, we can notice the abstract, intentionally decoratively edited structure of a black and white quasi-comic-strip, but if we move closer to the two-dimensional drawing and take some time out for – deliberately imposed by the optics – random browsing, we can discern the absurd, comical, unexpected, hybrid visual and textual fragments which present various characters and re-contextualize the quoted subculture phenomena or famous elements of mass culture and art. Matijevic’s Žabakazuda – which in often intelligible visual and verbal locution autoironically demonstrates the notion of the artist’s individual idiom, his first-person account as well as the practice of individual systems/mythologies – has been conceived as a work in progress by the execution of a picture-book. The work has the potential to grow into a universal project reflecting the artist’s authentic worldview and identity and to represent a life-style. Yet, does not the attempt of communication and recognition of common life experience reflect precisely in the reference to specifc cultural elements, no matter how much arbitrarily altered? Of course it does, but only among those observers who are ready to spare the time that the work requests.
Domagoj Sušac explores the temporary and perceptive aspect of the viewing/observing of painting. He questions its expressivity by means of painting a trivial decorative textile pattern with floral motif in function of the appropriation of a repetitive model. The pattern is asymmetrically set and it slips away and deconstructs the plan of the painting over which the gaze oscillates. The decorative pattern, which covers the whole surface, is on the other, coloristically complementary painting, discernible as a ready-made, as a found text originating from the culture in which the artist intervenes. The level of perception is multiplied to various layers by intuitive connecting of decorative motifs and by use of somewhat hermetic poetics of the unexpected as well as by seemingly arbitrary superimposing of the motif of doubled children’s up-and-down slide. The paintings whose perception depends on associative, rather then on rationally conceived sequence, interweave with the associations aroused by equally dominant textual elements. The very expressivity of words which simultaneously suggest free movement and determined limitation of movement and congestion, focus the gaze on single painting. The ironically coded strip balloons, which in its mirror
re.ection rather suggest then declare, infect the whole space of the work with their menacing vagueness. The integrity of its form is however disturbed and also, but at smaller extent, infected by the decorative pattern. Trompe-l’oeil? Rather leading the stare to slide over the surface of the painting, from scattered ephemeral decorative background, over colors and words to condensed cores of text. What is the portion of perception that the artist intentionally controls, in.uencing the observer’s decoding of latent, unintentionally induced, meanings?
Indeed, it is even today possible to establish a dialogue using the visual idiom founded on the personal, private system of signs and associations, mediated by the traditional visual medium in which observer remains observer. The communication potential, which is realized by these works, contains the predisposition for the development of particular kind of social quality. Indirectly, these works – although they do not belong to the category of works and events denominated by the notion of relational aesthetics – indicate towards the possibility of reduction of the inter-personal distance by the development of sensibility for the intuitive and associative aspect of communication, beside the virtual and the rational, as desirable characteristics for mutual understanding. On the other hand, Baudrillard for rather a long time claims that in our society the communication as “something hyperrelational (…) leads social form into indifference”“May it be a dream, myth, utopia, conflict or contradictory form, in any case it is an occasional and extraordinary event.”3 Or?
Ana-Marija Koljanin
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Mario Čaušić
OBSERVING THE CITY, triptych, enamel on sheet metal, 3 x r 50cm, 2004.
OBSERVING THE CITY, DVD video loop, 5\’ 3\’\’, 2004.
Tihomir Matijević
ŽABAKAZUDA OF THE TITLES,FROM THE CYCLE “DECORATIVE SUPREMATISM” (AND IT\’S THE ONLY WORK FROM THAT CYCLE) OR AN ANOTHER FUTILE ENDEAVOUR TO DRAW THE WHOLE WORLD, ink on paper, hardboard, 216x302cm, 2003./4.
ŽABAKAZUDA FOR BEGINNERS, book, self-published, 2003.
Domagoj Sušac
FIREWALK, oil on canvas, 148x198cm, 2004.
ROAD, triptych, mixed technique on canvas and board, total dimension 58x140cm, 2004.
.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Curatorial concept: Ana-Marija Koljanin
