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Jovan Despotović

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Forms of natural state and primary meanings in the works of Zdravko Joksimovic

The Visual arts of the mid-nineties blend experiences of different artistic practices of recent or encient past. More often then not, curious artists of a restless creative minde and vivid imagination, ’jump up’ from the given style framework of their own epoch (which many consider as non-existent), and enter and open, both literally and plasticaly speaking, completely liberated spaces of new forms. By the and of the modern civilization and this millenium, the attempt to created ’a new form’ of an activ artistic minde, does not exhaust itself in the usal way, i.e. in the retrieval of examples form the history of art, but also in the inquiry of the iner, one’s own spaces of memory, experiences, sensibility, individual mythologies, within a wide civilizational field, which only partially involves a strictly artistic and creative need.

Yugoslav author of a younger generation, Zdravko Joksimovic is an artist whose presence on today atistic scene is mostly defined by the propositions and purpose of the universal developments in the actual arts. The creation of forms with the image and meaning adequate to the global cultural mileu, faces the authors with a crucial bewilderment: on the one hand, responsibility towards one’s own spiritual environment and issue of artistic continuity; and on the other, the drive to avert the actual tensions, civilizational turmoil, cultural clashes wich prevent young artists from seeing the process of discontinuity in arts, of leaps from one artistic concept to another, of interweaving of complitely different models, of a plastic language decoded rather by its external obvious manifestations than internal hints of an interpretator.

Three terra-cotta rotondas of Zdravko Joksimovic created in 1993 speak the language of ther own form, with their minimum graphic intervention and primary strucrure of low relief. Although a sculpture by education, Zdravko Joksimovic does not accept the limits of his media, but expands plastic effects of his works towards coloristic sheres. This strategy of interweaving different influences should satisfy the curiosity of modern artistic regarding the most vulnerable point in the act of creation: when a form becames an integral work of art.

But, as these works emerge within the post-conceptual experience, their responsibility to that creative corpus is also indisputable. For example, the need of irony and for a search for a meta linguistic state within the work itself (these works are entitled 'Playgrounds'). The playing with rules of the media itself, of forms which can be read in different ways depending on the plastic concepts and the understanding of 'styles' in art, as well as breaking through the different interpretations of purposes and goals of the author were already mentioned. What is obvius is a highly stratified meaning which at first sight the works are reduced to their basic features: media (relisf), material (clay), form (raster fields).

The essentual understanding of this type of work lies in respect for those basic features, a visual static of a work of art, its image, actually its natural state. The search for the potencial of materials used in art, respect for its nature, and for the work of art as such, leads us to understand the contemporary work of art emerges from an alchemic activity ahich, as the ulmost principle of creation, amkes the selection of a number of illusions which surround the artist, and their rationalization, structuring and embodying to the state of primary form and primary meoning.

Jovan Despotovic

22nd Bienal of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, 1994