Album of the Non-existent Antiquities
Even when it sought the fragment “anarchy” in the structure of collage, the art of Tomislav Čeranić always expressed the need for order, regularity, harmony, subordination of the parts in a whole. When I presented the cycle of collages L’age d’or in 1996 I have noticed that this artist was always rather reconciling then confronting the fragments of reality (collage), thus expressing the pronounced affinity to order in which there is no place for material roughness and influence of raw slivers of reality. The elegant tone of classic painting was present even in his works executed in surrealist style or those that invoked ludic heritage of the avant-garde. For all that his works lacked typical modernist polemics while distanced placability prevailed. His paintings did not polemize but conversed with the past, whether it was anachronistic or avant-garde and instead of vehement gesture prevailed the “draughtman’s” silent enthusiasm that cared most about the perfect display of parts in a whole and the complete control of the harmonizing procedure. His drawings, even more than his collages, enhanced the inbred propensity for meticulousness in precise construction of details, characteristic of a careful architect aware of the need to plan everything in advance in order to assure firmness of the future construction. In distinction from those drawers who use details as devices in service of the whole that they are secretly creating, for Čeranić they are equally important for the perception as the massive contour resulting from their union. Sometimes we have the impression that our attention is captured by this meticulous detail alone, and that only by looking into the microstructure of the work we can grasp its macro-plan. Because the stability of architectural fragment seems to depend on every stone or brick that was built into its thoroughly planned volume.
The cycle of pencil drawings Star City (2001-2002) is one of Čeranić’s homage to detail, which, crossing the centuries, might be placed among the works of architects and illustrators from the past who were especially concerned about the existence of their drawings as independent, thoroughly defined and to the smallest details worked out drawing creation. Čeranić is not even concealing his paragons, he uses the fragments of their architectural designs in order to fit them into his personal constructive fancy. Although it should be said that as a draughtman he does not aspire to feasibility of his project. Instead of imagining a future palace, church or residential building, his final goal is to give his projects a convincing architectural life on the paper and in the retro-imagination by which he revives the past. Namely, absorbed in built and non built projects of the 18th century architects like Etienne-Louis Boullee and Nicholas Ledoux, as well as Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s architectural illustrations and archaeological reconstructions or Atanasius Kircher’s (1) fantastic illustrations, Čeranić constructs the structure of Star City, Utopian city realistic in plastic and architectural details, but fantastic as a functional unity. But this city is not some high-tech organism of the future centuries (2), but the city of the future that appeared in the imagination of the architectural fantasist of the 18th century. Namely, referring to the architects and illustrators that opposed the predominant style and taste of the “gallant century”, Čeranić has adhered to certain Utopia created on the retro-principle of these times. In fact, by reconstructing the forgotten classic-renaissance architectural order, Boullee, Ledoux, Kircher and Piranesi anticipate the art that will come into life a century later with the classicist revival. In the 18th century, imagining a memorial dedicated to Isaac Newton, Etienne Boulle designs the never built cenotaph in shape of planetarium, a domed building reminiscent of a landed space ship. Then he imagines the gigantic basilica Bibliotheque du Roi that should keep the whole bibliographic memory of the world under its spherical vault and endless colonnade. Boullee’s sacral designs are equally monumental, with prevailing symmetry and regular alternation of spherical, cylindrical and pyramidal forms. The later centuries continued Boullee’s monumentality, even trying to surpass it with the dimensional persuasiveness like in Alfred Speer’s projects for The Third Reich as well as in the Soviet official projects from the ‘20s. However, Boullee’s architecture was devoid of ideological content and momentary political boosting. Boullee cared in the first place, just as Nicholas Ledoux, for the modernization of architectural purity of Egyptian-classical architecture. The following centuries will prove them right by renovating this tradition ad an ideal to the contemporary architecture devoid of ornamentation with no function, of plastic obesity that was choking under the weight of adornment. Piranesi’s architectural reconstructions of the classical world, his scrupulous analysis of details and enumeration of every stone or archaeological fragment seem to make Čeranić sure that the truth about the miraculous statics that keeps assembled the pieces of the magnificent building can be grasped only through the detailed engrossing in its structure. There is the impression that there is no dispensable stone in the structure and that if even the smallest should lack the stability of the structure would be seriously impaired.
Čeranić’s structures in the cycle Star City, consequently, contain the provisions of the mentioned paragons in architecture and illustration. It is even possible to see the direct architectural pattern of the cool and elegant antiquity quoted on the so-called neo-neo principle (3). The neo-neo art, as M. šuvaković mentions, “is the art of indulgence in the splendor of concluded and dead styles”. There is no doubt that Čeranić is not aware of the “death” of architectural order that he is transferring to us from the 18th century. The artist is not, that is to say, suggesting that we should construct according to Boullee’s or Ledoux’s instructions. Before all he is fascinated with the spirit of solemn seriousness, residentiality and monumentality, certain sober megalomania of his paragons. Obsessed with the testimony of the power of this architecture he does not ponder its utility. Furthermore, he teaches us that it is fitting only into one more postmodern album of non-existent antiquities. Because even in its own times it was not more than a hardly feasible project. Placing this architecture into the vacuum of levitation, Čeranić supports its functional uselessness, he takes it out from the context of everyday practicability allowing it to touch the clouds of fancy in the state of zero gravity.
Vinko Srhoj
——–
(1) Illustrations in the book Latium by Atanasius Kricher show the reconstruction of the Roman general Quintilianus Varus’ villa in the shape of ziggurat, placed in the contemporary French garden. As a referent point here is also Kircher’s book Turis Babel, an eclectic classic-renaissance-baroque attempt of reconstruction of the Babel Tower. Čeranić’s drawing Star City (fig. IV), showing domed architectural structures that radially grow from its core, contains the direct quotation of Kircher’s vision of the interiors of our planet.
(2) Such projects were also created in Maljevič’s architectural-design laboratory UNOVIS in the beginning of the 20th century. The floating orbital cities by Ilija Časnik should be marked as an example.
(3) A term neo-neo is used for the works of postmodern (and post-conceptual) art that are pondering the past of certain themes, forms and styles that were even in their own time representing the historical neo versions (e.g. the adoration of the classic in the works of Boullee, Ledoux, Piranesi or in classicism).
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Tomislav Čeranić
Born 1971. in Šibenik, Croatia. He graduated History of Art from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Exhibits since 1986.
