Artist

Simonida Rajčević (1974)

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Acrylic Afternoons

Author: Branislav Dimitrijević

Italian 15th century Renaissance art, among other fundamental changes, introduced the human body as an effective unit of the scene, story and emotional character presented. To simplify, the character of the figure did not depend either on physiognomy (the individual character), or on strict religious canons which represented the consummation of the painting as the moment of religious elevation. The painting was above all determined by the way in which the figure moved. In his “Treatise on Painting”, Alberti said the following:” There are movements of body: growth, shrinkage, illness, recovery, movements from one place to another..We, the painters who want to show the movements of spirit by movements of body parts, use only the movements from one place to another.”


In other words, it is revealed that expression is achieved only through the relation between the bodies in the painting, and thus the age of theatricality begins in art.


However, “the old masters” invoked from the past in the paintings of  Simonida Rajcevic, are not the artists from the 15th century, but from the 16th and even 17th century; artists like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens and especially Tintoretto and El Greco. These are the artists in whose paintings the movements and relations between bodies are not only the plastic signs which determine the composition of the painting trough Alberti’s model: “surface – member – body – painting”.


In their paintings the body is ecstatic, dominant but vulnerable, the thing that causes or presents the aim of God’s intervention; a body whose anatomy is exposed to a delirious painter’s experimentation, shortenings or assigns unnaturalistic coloring. Such a body, put in impossible positions, actually becomes the central metaphor of transformation that art makes. Michelangelo’s figura serpentinata , as the model for art which in history is denoted as manneristic ( and the figure which Alberti rejected as excessively unequal since it exposed the front and the back side at the same time), was a mobile form compared to the sight of flame; a figure which depended less and less on the real qualities and potential of the body, and more and more on the exploration of bordering spiritual and physical situations in which it was represented. But also, thanks to the marvelous possibilities and distortions of such a figure, the space of the painting becomes less a stage, and more a specific space in which the laws of gravity are decreasingly simulated and illusion increasingly develops on both imaginary sides of the painted surface.


In contrast to the paintings that have justly attracted most attention in last few years on the Belgrade scene – the so – called “first person painting”, the ego-painting where the identification develops primarily through the faces and the net of returned glances (and which is in its distant background deeply Byzantine) – the paintings of Simonida Rajcevic very determinedly and convincingly impos the centrality of body and its gestures as the main mystery of art and experience of the 90-ies. In this sense, the paintings of old masters, i.e. the chosen fragments of these paintings, serve as the traditional models of bodily affectation, which are transformed by the technique of acrylic (which Simonida uses) into the world of quick results and media manipulation. However, from the professional point of view,  Simonida’s “express old masters” show that some characteristics of her models can be successfully articulated again in the art of our time. Her painting is full of motion, “fiery” moves, orientated towards plastics of figures achieved by warm but also “poisonous” coloring with few cold shadows. As such, it is both fresh and quite sufficiently “sick” for the time we live in. The choice of acrylic is interesting in the conceptual way too, for acrylic is a technique of the 20th century, the color which Pollock poured out over his canvases, the color of unmistakably even surfaces of minimalistic painting, but also a technique that was already first in use in the 20-ies by an excluded but influential group of Mexican muralists. Acrylic therefore originally appears as a mediator between huge surfaces, the domination of the presented bodies and unconcealed social involvement.


The exhibition of paintings by which the gallery ZVONO achieves a compressed paraphrase of those aggressive painted chambers like the Sistine Chapel, is surely extended in the installation of this artist presented in 1995 under the name THE LAST SURVIVOR FROM THE NOSTROMO. In it the modern SF model (films from “the Alien” cycle) was used as metaphorical articulation of the current social, sexual and political relations, new feministic theories and, generally the disintegration of the patriarchate on one side, and incurable viruses and wars on the other side. In the case of this installation too (as a result of the traditional painter’s nerve) the body is the focus of the “actual experience “ the voice of nature that express its presence in culture by its own fear for existence.


In each of Simonida’s paintings there are bodies in movement taken over from the number of originals, but this combination of fragments does not invite us to decode the allegorical meaning, characteristic for the paintings of the 80-is, but puts in the front plane the question of the logic of physical presentation. However, in this painting, the demanding observer will find some “thematic” rules, some motives, which are mostly connected with events in relation to Christ’s torments, the moment when the body of the Savior takes over the sins of mankind. However, in Simonida’s paintings there is no Christ’s body, it is the marked absence, with the whirlpool of other bodies that gesticulate his sacrifice around it. And to return to beginning, to the 15th century, when bodies in paintings began to move, gesticulate and to open to personal visions, but when the figure of Christ was still an untouchable canon, the body without a body, once and for all described mystery. In every attractive painting, and even in one that is swarming with invested exists, which really makes our view active.


Branislav Dimitrijevic

(Translation by Helena Obradovic and Vanesa Strojic)

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