Author: Mileta Prodanović (1959)
The newest research showed that "silent" reading is dozens of centuries younger than literacy itself. According to psychologists, capital letters are connected with reading out aloud and only when the short hand, "written letters" appeared, prerequisite for "silent" reading was opened. If we would widen the term of "reading" to work of art, we might separate two types of reading. One of them would be limited to observing and conceptual adopting of already existing experience, known and less known achievements. Another type, reading out aloud, besides "absorbing", has also backflow of "demonstrating", something that might easily be named "visual aloud reading".
Antoine Watteau was a painter who came into the world of art through repetition and emancipation of his own handwriting by observing and multiplying of his predecessors. Anđelka Bojović in her long series of works, paintings, pastels and drawings, starts with works in which Watteau is but a quotation. The theme is, however, the scene of dialogue with Watteau. In those early works there is a space and hints of "reading" subject. In works which follow, the focus is on the space itself of Watteau's work. Later on, some details and fragments are chosen from the well known paintings. That model, focused and increased in those "essaylike drawings" of Anđelka Bojović, was becoming but a distant pretext, focus around which a new dynamical field is flowing.
The adventure of "aloud reading" Watteau in the works of Anđelka Bojović has, obviously, more modalities. There are some works in which the colour is specially accented, which is considered to be one of the most important dimensions of the famous French painter works. But there is also a line of works in which this dimension is consciously broken to point out something else - temperament. In such a reading, dominated by drawings, the basic intention of the cycle of works of Anđelka Bojović is shown more clearly, a need for dialogue of two epochs, two artists and two rhythms.
Mileta Prodanović
Translated by Svetlana Ivanković Šubic