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Danijela Purešević

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SnakeWall

With the force of a typhoon, Simonida Rajčević sweeps through the entire landscape of civilization searching for the purpose of human body, sexuality, sin, and taboos. Reports from her journeys are shaped in two friezes – two monumental Snakewalls.


By its structure and composition, one Snakewall is more linear in its narration, more gradual and analogue. The other one is fragmented, unpredictable, closer to digital language code. However, both are fiercely expressive and dramatic, both full of tension characteristic for the matter that is about to break and explode.


The crucial element of these walls is, naturally, the richly symbolic snake – the symbol of Man’s original sin according to the Bible, but also the symbol that unites the aspects of ground and underground, water and fire, positive and negative, but also the principles of male and female, signifying sexual duality.


An important support role in the construction of the Snakewall naturally belongs to the wall itself – a barrier towards the unknown, a restriction, an obstacle, a line of division but also a strong carrier of civilization messages from the Western (Wailing) Wall, through the Great Wall of China to Berlin Wall and many other nameless walls.


Realized in the poetic key of „the Creation of the World“ (entailing both the story of the sin as well as the story of the serpent), with implicit aroma of drama and pathos, the two friezes resonate with the thunder of God’s wrath after the original sin was committed, the wrath which destroyed the pure and idylic world of Eden. Creating her own monumental compositions, Simonida Rajcevic chooses and relies on elements from common civilizational art collection, primarily the underscored carnal element and Eros that support her thought – from antique sculptures, through the figurative codes of Michaelangelo, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, as well as Haring and Basquiat, with touches of Goya and literature of Boris Vian, to the reminiscences and quotes from Emanuela, Last Tango in Paris, In the Realm of the Senses, French erotic movies, all the while borrowing important influences from graffiti art, comics, film techniques, rock’n’roll... Black, white and red, sometimes they are more of a drawing, sometimes more a painting, in the dramatic storm of Eros and Tanatos.


The symptomatic point of one of these two Snakewalls, the one with a more compact narrative line, is surely a place where the cut is made from color to black and white (this meaningful cut, among other things, marks the transition from painting to film quotations). Somewhere on the borderline between these two worlds, in the color field, we recognize as a dominant figure one of Laocoon’s sons from El Greco’s famous painting Laocoon. Laocoon and his sons, or the Laocoon Group, frequently interpeted as the basic patern in scultpure and fine art from ancient times until today, is the embodiment of the myth of Trojan priest Laocoon. Apollo sent two serpents againt Laoccon and his sons, that, after a dramatic struggle, take them forever to the darkness of the underworld. However, it is less known that Laocoon did not incur the wrath of Apollo only by taking part in the Trojan war, but also because, much earlier, he defied the rule of priesthood by getting married and begetting sons, and by daring to have sexual intercourse with his wife in Apollo’s sanctuary, in front of his statue.


German archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, speaking of the ancient Greek Laoccon Group in the 18th century, points out to the paradox of getting the impression of exquisite beauty while observing the scene of death and fall. With the same suspense of Eros and Tanatos, Simonida Rajcevic unites all protagonists of the two friezes into one big Laocoon’s family entangled into serpent’s coil.


Danijela Purešević

(Translation by Helena Đorđević)