Exhibitions, Italy, Trento, 08 February 2014
"Silence is ambiguous. It can signify a fracture or an affirmation. However, it can also manifest an affirmation of a fracture or multiple fractures".
As an artistic proposition of evident paintings, Silent Fracture, explained from the position of existentialism, can be understood by the philosophical concept of "the Absurd", absurdus derived from the Latin surdus or mute. Time-wise, it is anachronistic, space-wise it is dystopian. It is a formal manifestation of both the human tendency to seek some inherent meaning in the universe and the human impossibility of finding meaning. There are several fractures that silently emanate from Despotovic’s paintings. However, as absurdist they can be, the paintings still resonate strongly.
To understand the relation between Despotovic’s Silent Fracture and the absurd, one has to recall the positions of possible fractures in his artistic proposition.
The first fracture concerns Despotovic’s intellectual identity which can be defined by the relations an artist establishes. Contrary to the interpretations of Italian critics and curators, who have so far emphasized his South Eastern European origin, his attachment to that art world is silently denied, and not only because he has acquired his formal education in Italy, and is currently based in Berlin. That denial is not happening, perhaps because he finds the Serbian art world hermetic. It is, rather, due to his urge to approach contemporary painting from an individualistic insider's position, not from what has been inscribed in it from the outside. If he ever belonged his country of origin, he could be wrongly placed amongst the artists concerned with childhood narratives expressing difficulties of growing up or not even being conscious of the necessity to become mature. However, he is reaching maturity by creating his own place of origin and belonging by insisting that reality does not exist objectively, but is a fiction, a parallel life, a bridge over fractures, that he is an archaic anarchist, a post-punk, or an existentialist painter. Being also detached from the cultural contexts of his artistic formation, Despotovic is able to create his own cultural space.To play the role of an artist without a country allows him to delay the moment of understanding and to reinforce idiosyncratic perspectives . It seems that the particularity of the cultural space Despotovic willingly participates in allows for total responsibility in total solitude, that can be, according to Sartre, “the revelation of [... freedom]” . What Sartre meant in La Republique du Silence (1944), referring to German occupation, was a metaphor of colonized cultural space; furthermore: “Each gesture had the weight of a commitment” . Such a position is related to the way painting can be approached today. In the last issue of Frieze magazine, the attempt to understand painting was revised in the 8 Painters on Painting special supplement. For example, Rose Wylie explains the position of silent solitude in the following sentence: "You are on your own with a painting, from start to finish, and it’s up to you where you are with it and art history...so, it’s something worthwhile to work with."
The absurdity of not belonging where he is expected to belong, has cultural implications and formal manifestations.This is related to the fracture between the appropriated images that are haunting Despotovic and the final formal outcome. He is committed to investigating decontextualized images, to penetrating them and playing with them as pure form. The long methodical process of digging through image archives precedes the act of painting. The filter for digging through the visual legacy is formal, it is not ideological. The method by which Despotovic approaches the images implies manipulation of the image, a particular reductionism or overwriting. Once he finds the base that he will deconstruct, he turns photos into negatives and changes their shade. His compositions come to life by contrasting certain elements and then rejecting other parts to become consistent and refined. Immersed in this slow process he is committed to investigating decontextualized images, to penetrating them, and to abstracting forms. He draws a line between calculation and intuition by reinforcing an almost instinctive gesture where form and formal possibilities are more important than the content. Despotovic is committed to painting classical motives such as portraits, interiors, still natures, where meaning is given by nothingness, by pre-established and reformed forms though not pre-established meanings. What it will mean should be derived solely from how it looks.To paint is not to say anything new but to commemorate and dig into the past by examining the same language that has been introduced by art history. By doing so, he belongs to the new generation of painters such as Annie Lapin or Adrian Ghenie who deconstruct the materials of painting in order to explore how the physical qualities of the medium inherit their abilities to function as language, and to convey time and memory. Despotovic is also greatly concerned with the relationship between process and form and, just like Lapin, has produces paintings that function as both repositories of the various production processes of the studio and delicate compositions3.
Another fracture is that between his previous exhibition at the Boccanera Gallery and the images that are proposed in the Silent Fracture. While in The Velvet Glove (2010) Despotovic was dealing with infant subjects, the outdoors, and vibrant colours, Silent Fracture presents a certain maturity, with all contradictions that embodies. Mature, almost mystical subjects, and darker enclosed interiors are an effect of a meditation on personal experience, as well as an investigation of its form.
The break from his previous paintings is a result of a metamorphosis that emerged from the idea of how to represent a form that has changed in the moment of its physical development. Despotovic does not deconstruct the medium of painting but, instead, the formal aspects of painting. His idea is to find an expressive way, a personal interpretation of the conditions in which they have come to being. His recent art works, differently from his previous ones mainly in oil on canvas, are expressed in a variety of techniques: acrylic and décollage on paper mounted on canvas, décollage and acrylic on paper, acrylic on book pages, acrylic on canvas, acrylic and collage on wood, and even embroidery of cotton on jute. By reconsidering techniques, he wants to distance himself from reality. Now the form is taken to extremes; it is abstracted in such a way that it becomes aggressive and lost. He has reached more abstract solutions to his visual regime. A metamorphosis emerges from the accumulation of gestures, colours and textures and is the effect of personal resistance towards his own drives. Previously frivolous and bizarre paintings, based on a fairytale-with-a-twist approach, have been exchanged for more impulsive paintings and darker atmospheres. Despotovic continues to resist in order to find meaning, but he remains focused on form or goes directly to the substance of the real thing . He is silently disqualifying cultural legacies, contemporary trends, even his own itinerary, and “betrays” them to find a satisfying form. Struggling with the effect of his predecessors in painting, he manages to resist any ideology and he dedicates himself to intuitive form.
Not being totally satisfied with aesthetics, he continues his struggle on canvas, going from the worst to the best version in one day. He does not approach painting as a product but as a process that has to be visible on the surface of the painting: the elements that are not completely defined are pointers to this process; this is, according to Despotovic, far more important than style and its meaning. Formal fracture comes about during the process of accumulating gestures and textures, while his relation to colours is often surprising in a way that fluorescent colours emerge where least expected. The method that can be described as Paint & Forget is an absurd approach to a form, where meanings collide to reinforce the atmosphere.
What do all these fractures mean? They make us consider the cultural implications of Despotovic’s intellectual identity. His questionable individual belonging and his resistance to geopolitical implications lead to almost anachronistic aesthetics, a result of his pursuit to the creation of a good painting. Silence is a filter for the fractured, atomized self, for the maladjustment and territorial uprooting that find their way into his painting. Despotovic accepts that absurdity fractures meaning by stating that painting can never give an answer to anything, and that an answer should not even be looked for.
Here is a direct relationship between the personal freedom of the artist and the aesthetic quality of his works. Not to actualise nor to relate to history and geography; it is precisely this that allows him a hypothetical social freedom and the quality of an aesthetic production. Metaphorically speaking, just like multiple layers of the non-formal aspects of his paintings, this exhibition resonates with vivid emptiness: lonely portraits and the interiors without subjects.
http://www.arteboccanera.com/exhibitions.php?act=view&lng=it&id=109
As an artistic proposition of evident paintings, Silent Fracture, explained from the position of existentialism, can be understood by the philosophical concept of "the Absurd", absurdus derived from the Latin surdus or mute. Time-wise, it is anachronistic, space-wise it is dystopian. It is a formal manifestation of both the human tendency to seek some inherent meaning in the universe and the human impossibility of finding meaning. There are several fractures that silently emanate from Despotovic’s paintings. However, as absurdist they can be, the paintings still resonate strongly.
To understand the relation between Despotovic’s Silent Fracture and the absurd, one has to recall the positions of possible fractures in his artistic proposition.
The first fracture concerns Despotovic’s intellectual identity which can be defined by the relations an artist establishes. Contrary to the interpretations of Italian critics and curators, who have so far emphasized his South Eastern European origin, his attachment to that art world is silently denied, and not only because he has acquired his formal education in Italy, and is currently based in Berlin. That denial is not happening, perhaps because he finds the Serbian art world hermetic. It is, rather, due to his urge to approach contemporary painting from an individualistic insider's position, not from what has been inscribed in it from the outside. If he ever belonged his country of origin, he could be wrongly placed amongst the artists concerned with childhood narratives expressing difficulties of growing up or not even being conscious of the necessity to become mature. However, he is reaching maturity by creating his own place of origin and belonging by insisting that reality does not exist objectively, but is a fiction, a parallel life, a bridge over fractures, that he is an archaic anarchist, a post-punk, or an existentialist painter. Being also detached from the cultural contexts of his artistic formation, Despotovic is able to create his own cultural space.To play the role of an artist without a country allows him to delay the moment of understanding and to reinforce idiosyncratic perspectives . It seems that the particularity of the cultural space Despotovic willingly participates in allows for total responsibility in total solitude, that can be, according to Sartre, “the revelation of [... freedom]” . What Sartre meant in La Republique du Silence (1944), referring to German occupation, was a metaphor of colonized cultural space; furthermore: “Each gesture had the weight of a commitment” . Such a position is related to the way painting can be approached today. In the last issue of Frieze magazine, the attempt to understand painting was revised in the 8 Painters on Painting special supplement. For example, Rose Wylie explains the position of silent solitude in the following sentence: "You are on your own with a painting, from start to finish, and it’s up to you where you are with it and art history...so, it’s something worthwhile to work with."
The absurdity of not belonging where he is expected to belong, has cultural implications and formal manifestations.This is related to the fracture between the appropriated images that are haunting Despotovic and the final formal outcome. He is committed to investigating decontextualized images, to penetrating them and playing with them as pure form. The long methodical process of digging through image archives precedes the act of painting. The filter for digging through the visual legacy is formal, it is not ideological. The method by which Despotovic approaches the images implies manipulation of the image, a particular reductionism or overwriting. Once he finds the base that he will deconstruct, he turns photos into negatives and changes their shade. His compositions come to life by contrasting certain elements and then rejecting other parts to become consistent and refined. Immersed in this slow process he is committed to investigating decontextualized images, to penetrating them, and to abstracting forms. He draws a line between calculation and intuition by reinforcing an almost instinctive gesture where form and formal possibilities are more important than the content. Despotovic is committed to painting classical motives such as portraits, interiors, still natures, where meaning is given by nothingness, by pre-established and reformed forms though not pre-established meanings. What it will mean should be derived solely from how it looks.To paint is not to say anything new but to commemorate and dig into the past by examining the same language that has been introduced by art history. By doing so, he belongs to the new generation of painters such as Annie Lapin or Adrian Ghenie who deconstruct the materials of painting in order to explore how the physical qualities of the medium inherit their abilities to function as language, and to convey time and memory. Despotovic is also greatly concerned with the relationship between process and form and, just like Lapin, has produces paintings that function as both repositories of the various production processes of the studio and delicate compositions3.
Another fracture is that between his previous exhibition at the Boccanera Gallery and the images that are proposed in the Silent Fracture. While in The Velvet Glove (2010) Despotovic was dealing with infant subjects, the outdoors, and vibrant colours, Silent Fracture presents a certain maturity, with all contradictions that embodies. Mature, almost mystical subjects, and darker enclosed interiors are an effect of a meditation on personal experience, as well as an investigation of its form.
The break from his previous paintings is a result of a metamorphosis that emerged from the idea of how to represent a form that has changed in the moment of its physical development. Despotovic does not deconstruct the medium of painting but, instead, the formal aspects of painting. His idea is to find an expressive way, a personal interpretation of the conditions in which they have come to being. His recent art works, differently from his previous ones mainly in oil on canvas, are expressed in a variety of techniques: acrylic and décollage on paper mounted on canvas, décollage and acrylic on paper, acrylic on book pages, acrylic on canvas, acrylic and collage on wood, and even embroidery of cotton on jute. By reconsidering techniques, he wants to distance himself from reality. Now the form is taken to extremes; it is abstracted in such a way that it becomes aggressive and lost. He has reached more abstract solutions to his visual regime. A metamorphosis emerges from the accumulation of gestures, colours and textures and is the effect of personal resistance towards his own drives. Previously frivolous and bizarre paintings, based on a fairytale-with-a-twist approach, have been exchanged for more impulsive paintings and darker atmospheres. Despotovic continues to resist in order to find meaning, but he remains focused on form or goes directly to the substance of the real thing . He is silently disqualifying cultural legacies, contemporary trends, even his own itinerary, and “betrays” them to find a satisfying form. Struggling with the effect of his predecessors in painting, he manages to resist any ideology and he dedicates himself to intuitive form.
Not being totally satisfied with aesthetics, he continues his struggle on canvas, going from the worst to the best version in one day. He does not approach painting as a product but as a process that has to be visible on the surface of the painting: the elements that are not completely defined are pointers to this process; this is, according to Despotovic, far more important than style and its meaning. Formal fracture comes about during the process of accumulating gestures and textures, while his relation to colours is often surprising in a way that fluorescent colours emerge where least expected. The method that can be described as Paint & Forget is an absurd approach to a form, where meanings collide to reinforce the atmosphere.
What do all these fractures mean? They make us consider the cultural implications of Despotovic’s intellectual identity. His questionable individual belonging and his resistance to geopolitical implications lead to almost anachronistic aesthetics, a result of his pursuit to the creation of a good painting. Silence is a filter for the fractured, atomized self, for the maladjustment and territorial uprooting that find their way into his painting. Despotovic accepts that absurdity fractures meaning by stating that painting can never give an answer to anything, and that an answer should not even be looked for.
Here is a direct relationship between the personal freedom of the artist and the aesthetic quality of his works. Not to actualise nor to relate to history and geography; it is precisely this that allows him a hypothetical social freedom and the quality of an aesthetic production. Metaphorically speaking, just like multiple layers of the non-formal aspects of his paintings, this exhibition resonates with vivid emptiness: lonely portraits and the interiors without subjects.
http://www.arteboccanera.com/exhibitions.php?act=view&lng=it&id=109
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