The Fenestra Aperta exhibition is the fourth whole in the problemic thread, after the Elevation of the Arc (Požega, the Hajdarović Gallery, 1993), Gates of the City (Zagreb, The Widened Media Space, the HDLU House, 1995) and Mirror Paintings for the End of the Century (Rovinj, the Holy Cross Chapel, 1997).
The painted boards, formatted with the reference to the theory of proportions and topped with semicircular arcs, are ambientalized works aimed at the very topos of the gallery situated in a glassed late modern business building. Unifying the two different and mutually confronted experiences, the experience of a modern art with a relaxed (and cheerful) gesture – created in a turnover of her own painting experience and as a homage to Ivan Kožarić – and the experience of the classic art inside the conceptual framework of Alberti\’s idea of the painting as a window open to the world (of harmony), these works search for the refined reconciliatory line of structural touching. By reducing the subject of the arc to an iconic sign in the state of its finished inner tension (semicircular arc), and the plane of the painting to a monochromatic, inexpressive surface of a free gesture, as primarily a verification of the (artistic) presence, establishing the sameness of a painting – an object – and its frame. The frame, i.e., the very edge of the painting, has taken on the role of the archidrawing, and the painted surface the role of an inner space. Finished with a semicircular arc as its edge, the painting plane, monochrome and uniconic, immediately becomes iconic, by enlivening polyvalent meaning fields in an ambivalence of a painted surface as an opening and a breakthrough and as an object. By itself or in a series, in diptychs or triptychs, on the whiteness of a gallery wall, by ambientalization it enlivens the hidden layers of sublimated historical rationalisations, opening up like a window, a bifora or a trifora. The dominant direction towards the illusion of an opening is just seemingly underlined by the cheerfulness of the ceruleum-blue colour, Mediterranean and Alexandrine, which covers equally all painted surfaces, for the picturality of the surface is marked (and individualised) before all by the multiplicity of the (unrepresentative) painting gesture.
In the rhythm of the time, this conceptual “semiologic painting” (M. šuvaković) has touched, by minimalization, the reconciliatory time of (neo)modernistic mannerisms. After “Mirror Paintings for the End of the Century”, opaquely golden and silvered, that have resacralized the Rovinj chapel-gallery of St. Cross into the “interior temple”, the blue paintings on the gallery wall seem to mark the ambiguous state of “a temporal resting place”. Indeed, the last days of the century pass blue.
Developing from former frameworks of “temporizing the topos” (1988), in projects-wholes connected with the places of a complicated personal (and professional) existence, bifurcated and fragmented, the obsessive working on the arc theme as a civilisation code whose iconics joins the ends and opens up space, and is notably related to time loops whence particular wholes were created. Reconstruction of the inner dynamics of the baroque porches (Požega, the Hajdarović Gallery), the recognisable sign of the exact historical topos, becomes detemporalized (cleansed by a differing stylistic measure) and adopted into a personal sign. In the inner tension of the monumental equilibrium it is just perceivable that the arc could vanish sideways, be doubled, that its bearings have no soil, and that the space remains closed. Even more expressive is the existential charge present in a pulsating and trembling gesturality of the builder form of semicircular portals, expressively repeated in crowded series, drawn in charcoal on “endless” rolls of paper, in a long temporal sequence and in various places.
Detemporalization is here achieved by an emancipation of the iconicity of semicircular arcs of the portals as gestural archidrawings opposed to the iconography of timeless “Gates of heavenly Jerusalem” from the Apocalypse, and symmetrical to the iconographic interpretation of the “Mondsee Stone” by Branko Fučić. Their ambientalization in the structure of the “Gates of the City” in the Widened Media Space (Zagreb, the HDLU House) thus became the anchorage of the significance of time\’s passing, the uncapturable “punctum temporalis”, but also the beneficial marking of the adopted topos. Related to that, the “Fenestra Aperta” equally beneficially marks the both – space and time
Zlatko Uzelac
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Sonja Briski Uzelac
Bprn in Belgrade where she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Philosophical Faculty, and did a Ph. D. thesis in the theory of avant-garde art.
