Artist

Jože Ciuha (1924 - 2015)

Follow this artist

Search

Joze Ciuha

Author: Ivana Benović (1983)

In the novel Un besoin de malheur Alain Bosquet tells the story of two writers who come from different cultural and social climates, France and Yugoslavia, during the sixties. Joze Ciuha devoted a rich cycle of watercolors to these two writers. Alain Bosquet wrote his novel and published it shortly after the death of Branko Miljkovic, whom he dedicated it to. Joze Ciuha created his exhibition as a tribute to great authors and creative artists, poets Alain Bosquet and Branko Miljkovic.



Long before his acquaintance with Bosquet, Ciuha lived in the early fifties in Ljubljana, where he completed the art academy. Since then and up to today his artistic activity is continuous without interruption, accompanied by writing and numerous study trips. Already by the late sixties he got the chance to encounter cultural diversity that the world could offer, and to incorporate the visual heritage of many cultures, especially Byzantine culture, into his own experience and paintings.



In 1969 Zoran Krzisnik, along with a number of artists-intellectuals from the former Yugoslavia established the elite artistic group "69, " which had as one of its goals commitment to the highest artistic criteria. Joze Ciuha belonged to group "69".



Ciuha, a cosmopolitan and citizen of the world, chose Paris as the place to settle in. At the beginning of the second decade of the present century, Joze Ciuha performs not only as a visual artist, but also as a highly reputed scholar, writer, academician, member of the european intellectual elite circle and artist who has behind him a rich and diverse artistic opus.



Based on this kind of opus, the artist can likewise today make appearances in the form of specific experiments, and to group up or form his works in relation to thematic units, such is the exhibition of watercolors dedicated to poets Bosquet and  Miljkovic. This exhibition is more intimate, diary-type, which summarizes some of the experiences, emotions and principles which inextricably link the artist with the creative work of the two poets. This exhibition also indicates the significant phenomenon of the influence of literary sources on artistic creation, which is a phenomenon that can be traced going deep into history, but which today is not as common nor explicit. Although we can assume that many contemporary works of art are inspired by literature that shapes and directs spiritual aspirations and the cultural climate of a period, rarely is the case that the work of art contains references to specific literary examples.



That is why the watercolors that Joze Ciuha devoted to Bosquet and Miljkovic should not be taken as an illustration of verses and words, but should be seen in the context of their joint authorship poetics. In the article "Orphic legacy of Alain Bosquet" Miljkovic says that the poet intended to speak the unutterable, but that the unutterability remains stronger than the poet himself. Ciuha’s watercolors represent the painter’s contribution to the poet’s unutterability, and the painting’s contribution to the unutterability of words. They do not seek to interpret, explain or illustrate, but along with the verses with which they dwell, they express the unutterability of "truth" by which they are guided. In this procedure there is the author's nostalgia for those who are gone, but whose words and verses still "color" his paintings. Or, as Ciuha poetically expresses in the sentence that he dedicates to Bosquet: "My watercolors still search for their painter in your verses."



Artistic expression refers to the nurtured side in the modernist tradition of a flat two-dimensionality as a guarantee of artistic autonomy, but it rarely leads the painter to abstraction. Mimetic imitation and anthropomorphism which are characteristic of Ciuha’s works, yet in places in watercolors give way to seemingly abstract forms. A certain lightness and transparency imposed by the work technique in the watercolor, make this exhibition on a formal as well as conceptual plan substantially different from the exhibition "Human Comedy" which by his painting was presented to the local audience in the RTS Gallery in 2007.



The artistic work of Joze Ciuha is distinctive because of its leaning on a variety of traditions, the Byzantine, European and non-European visual heritage, and thereby the iconography of his paintings can be correlated with the citation and eclectic practices of the postmodern. The watercolors in question are less burdened by these traditions, although in them also we find pictograms with indications of human figures, the organic world, or even calligraphic signs that may indicate symbolic potential of a non-European visual expression. However, in these watercolors the artist impresses a different spiritual, intellectual and emotional expression. While for the paintings from the series "Human Comedy" may be said that they are connected to the spiritual nature (beyond the artistic) of the world around us, for the watercolors from the series of homage to poets, we can suspect that they are connected to the nature of the artistic creation, in other words artistic records about art itself. The painter paints while the poets speak. Both by artistic means (verse, color) tend to hint the truth that otherwise can not be communicated. In order to emphasize the commonality of poetics, the painter writes out in turns the verses written by Miljkovic and Bosquet in his watercolors. Written words, however, are not only given as a tribute, but function as artistic expression, just as the empty space that took in these works precedence over the otherwise represented horror vacui, as if he as well stepped into the service of what is ineffable.



At a conceptual level, Ciuha’s watercolors are made out of belief in universal values ​​enshrined in art, by which art rises above the ordinariness and transience, but also above its creator. "The poem and the poet quickly exchange their roles. The poet instead of saying becomes said "(B. Miljkovic). The same can be said of the painter who believes (or knows) that his paintings have long taken precedence over what he wants to create out of them, and that they, as the words of the poet, broke loose from its author and began a life of their own. It seems that this is the reason why Ciuha decides upon paying tribute to two great poets, with whom he shares similar beliefs. As artists and as intellectuals, they opt for the highest standards of artistic expression as the superior peak of spiritual and ethical norms, sometimes even at the cost of hermeticality. Their actions are different, as well as the tools they use in the pursuit of their goals, but what binds them is the unshakeable confidence in the power of art (painting, verse) to always be above the transient and trivial, and thus to earn immortality in the world and time order.



Ivana Benovic                       

Translated by Jelena Popovic

Datum objavljivanja: