Artist

Gordana Dobrić

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G.D: Digressions in the postmodern art, and in still current artistic practice, which are understood under such notions as citation, historical recollection, memories...are a well-known experience in the Belgrade Artistic Circle which is best traced in the works of Bozidar Damjanovski, Gordana Jocic and Cedomir Vasic. Your work is also based on the history of arts: you are using the themes and motifs of Watteau's paintings as your inspiration and pattern. Why Watteau and the French Rococo painting?

A.B: The epoch of Rococo is in itself a challenge, since it is rich in details. Everything exists for beauty, elegance, enjoyment and pleasure. The pictures radiate optimism and romantic fascination in that fine sense of Rousseau's „return to nature". They have that colourful vibration which was later continued in the art of painting of pleinairism and impressionism. That vibrating phone can be felt even in Watteau who was famous as the malancholic of Rococo. All that intrigued my artistic sensibility. There have even been several shy attempts of studying and analyzing Watteau during my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, mainly because he was a marvelous draughtsman and a real representative of his epoch. Later on. when the citation of the bygone artist became quite usual, Watteau was already deep in my eyes and thoughts. At first, fragments of his scenes of amusememts in the country appeared in my paintings as segments of the representations of the interiors and the exteriors of the places I had visited. Playing with the well-known motifs gradually turned into serious studies of the characters of drawing, its gesture, colour experimenting and its meaning in the iconographie layer.

G.D: The problem of translating a well-known model and the problem of its interpretation can be seen on the example of „Mezzetin", equally in drawings and oil paintings. In the drawings which were first to appear, we can see patterns drawn in technical and technological research in classical mediums - drawings in pencil, ink, acrylic, experiments in collage, some interesting solutions in combined techniques. Decomposing thr source motif, its trenslation from a close-up into a focused frame, with changed artistic and iconograpfic contents results from this process. In oil paintings of large formats, artistic problem is treated through separate elements - part of the face, usually eye, ear, area around nose or mouth, the cap of the musician, his small shoe, hand that is playing... In further interpretation, the attention is drawn to the vibrating colourfulness, searching shown through the rich expressionistic palette, as well as in the treatment of pigments in the reconstruction of strokes and the evaluation of layers of colour from pasted to lazzurite touch. The intensity of the feeling for colourful turns the unpretentious operative model in focus into a vital plastic shape. This makes the painting as a whole active, contraru to Watteau's static works. Using particular colours, such as red, the emotional state of a picture can be graded all the way up to those utter boundaries of provocative spiritual eroticism. Why the preference for red and so much emotions in the translated paintings?


A.B: Poetics of „Mezzetin's" face, the picture in the Metropolitan Museum, can be understood as love, but also as passion.The red spot in his face was a revelation to me. I haven't seen it anywhere in the history: the redness of his mouth and the redness of his nose an cheeks, all in different qualities of one colour, and again, the redness of his skin which is completely different from the previous experience. As the result of those different qualities of red appeared „The Mouth", as an operative model, considered equally in colour effects, its reflexes, but also in a gesture snown by the materialization of pigment. The intensified colourfulness emerges from my own interpretation and has a prolonged effect in the colour psyhology and its symbolism. However, it shouldn't be forgotten that „Mezzetin" is a musician and that part of the emotions, so abundant in this figure, comes from the source model, which is an certain estatic state caused by the sound of a melody and personal emotion. It is also important that the motif in focus itself, on the other hand, carries a needed sensibility, provocative in its formal contents just as much as the chosen pose and gesture itself.


G.D: The problem of the presence of a frame in the iconography of the painting arises in small formats. Its introduction in the contents of the notion has an artistic character and refers to different approaches in its treatment and interpretation. It can be a purely artistic research into a decorative scheme of ornamented borders, a research into the plastic imitation of the longed for shape or the iconographie realization of its function in relation to the contents of a small visual display of a painting or drawing. With the introduction of laths as a three-dimensional shape, which physically gives a finall touch to the artistic scene, we are witnessing the change of a two-dimensional picture-drawing into a three-dimensional picture-object. This duality gives the possibility of its interpretation in the iconographie layer as a paraphrase of a well-known style, and, at the same time, as a metaphor of a new shape. How else can a frame be understood?


A.B: Rococo as a style means abundance. The aesthetics of that time includes the pompousness of a heavy, elaborately decorated frame. That is the sociology of that time. In the logic of my paintings frame is present as a phenomenon which 1 view in a careful balancing of the golden frame and the contents of the visual display. That phenomenon is present on a level of interpretation. Naturally, in my work I approach it as an aesthetical but also an utalitarian form, which has its particular meaning in the iconography of the artistic scene on the whole. Since the source shape originates from a period in which the use of gold and numerous ornamental details was necessary, it is, thus, quite normal that there are ornaments and needed aestheticism in my works. There is no need to be ashamed of this need for ornaments and gold, since they are elements which I cherish in my artistic expression, not only as a paraphrase or a metaphor of the contents, but also as that common human need for beautifull aesthetic shapes, which turn the object of art into a small cute thing, catching to the eye, but just as dear in hand. At times, this play unconsciously reminds me of my childhood when there was the following problem to solve: How to make a house for some small creatures?




Andjelka Bojovic, Gordana Dobric




Translated by Jelena Pavlovic