Artist

Sreto Bošnjak

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Picture of silence, Vsna Markovic

 


What do Vesna Marković's paintings live on, what kind of linguistic structures, ideas and spaces? Her paintings generalize forms, condense space and lighten it up with surreal light and secrets. They are conceived in the space visible to the eye, only to reveal themselves finally to the space of the mind. They do not wish to be the illusions of things, but the truth of the illusion of the being. One of her pastel paintings is entitled "The House of Light": it points to the symbolic aspect, and to a yet another meanigful dimension - in the light that pervades things and spaces, the rhythms are born of the powers that discover (or create) new shapes that the eye recognizes on its own and places in the depth of the sensation without the aid of any exact experience. In the Introduction to a Catalogue published for Vesna Marković's exhibition in 1989, Stojan Ćelić, the distinguished painter and pedagogue, saw and felt this special quality of her art: "These paintings constitute an attempt to substitute secondary reality for primary reality, to make the primary form, the shape that dominates the canvas, less important than the unfathomable inner happenings and the signs with which Vesna Marković is trying to lead us into the world of her dreams, her feelings and artistic and literary predilections".


 

      In terms of formal language (and motifs), the concept of her art is associative, it merely begins to outline a possible world without more definite shapes and their relations. Her paintings are dominated by a composition aimed at gradually opening up the space developing into several light planes. The reality of those paintings is therefore the invisible contents of the creative being (the subconscious, nostalgia for certain primal stages of experience, the poetic freedom of the artistic langauage), it is a part of the process in which the painting is drawing closer to itself rather than the world or the author.


 

      It ought to be made clear, however, that this is just an approximate definition of the real artistic structure of Vesna Marković's paintings and drawings. Having no strictly defined programme principles, her artistic consciousness treats a painting as an expression of intimate, subjective contents with mysterious meanings. In time, her paintings have matured and become visually purer, more emotional and meaningful. To balance the ... face of the painting, which is free from conspicuous colouring and unrolls into finely arranged planes, her drawings are more liberal, dynamic, pictorial, and dramatized by the collage technique.


 

      Ultimately, both her paintings and her drawings are an allusion to reality rather than an illusion of it, a poetic vision and intuition rather than the expression of the perceived and comprehended.