Work

Gardens of Self

My paintings are made by using by-products of abstraction.
Pavle Jovović

The shown works present combinations of different types of painting expressions. The painting is an object which is created by the means of self-expression. It is the cause of summing up various dispersed expressive potentials of the artist. The process of summing up is led by the attempt to emerge from the ‘cage’ of the previously learned and demonstrate a constantly ‘elusive self’. It is followed by outgrowing and turning inwards. The self, on the other hand, through every methodical mechanism applied to the canvas, proves to be an excess which recreates the painting. The methodical mechanism in this way comes into being as an answer to the ‘elusive self’.

The production process of these paintings can be seen as entering the so-called “gardens of manouche”1. Namely, if we take two symmetrical geometrical objects in blue and red which are then consciously visually manipulated, they give the illusion of a third, objectively inexistent geometrical form which derives from the area of the psyche, we enter the so-called “gardens of manouche”. By repeating this ‘experience’, our impression of a new geometrical structure which connects these two given forms is intensified. This is where the analogy with the optical game of entering the “gardens of manouche” comes in.

These analogies can also be found on different levels. The geometrical shapes which form the “gardens of manouche” comprise a structural infrastructure of complex motives shown on the paintings of the young author. He balances between the refined ‘void’ and the fear of confronting a quality of the void which we can denote as ‘nothing’. Confronted with the whiteness of the canvas, the artist compulsively instigates a method with the aim of controlling the outcome of a once infinite and intrinsic number of potentials. The painting here brings together the undetachable surplus and a methodical mechanism.

To sum it up, the expressive potential of painting represents a building block formed by a compulsive premeditation. It is a reaction to the blank white surface (the infinite potential of personal content) and the constantly elusive ‘self’ (the personal). The painting is subsequently realised only when the denoted white surface comes into contact with the paint which has the role of its ‘filler’.

The specificity of Pavle’s painting is in seeing it as an object which unifies those varied potentials of expression that it innately carries.

Sequences of expression construct the paintings and lead to the following formula:

Painting=object=expression.

The process of synthesis (unification) is constant.

Velimir Popović
Translation to English: Isidora Krstić

1 An experiment in perception psychology. As seen in: “Laws of Faith”, by Rüdiger Dahlke

Zjale

 

I am drawn to the mystery of the pattern of traditional Serbian rugs, its forgotten meaning. The fact is that, if we look at old specimens of traditional rugs, there is a certain order – the layout of colors, repetition and variations in the relations of the characters (motifs), tell me that there is a described event, ritual, probably a story. All the above mentioned is necessary to make a story: repetition (reciprocity) shows temporality, variations to the development of events, spatial positioning of a certain motif, perhaps, to a different place of action, or more probably, to the importance of a certain happening for the story. In a similar way a child’s drawing is structured, where more important elements are larger and above others, or the position of frescos with biblical stories shown on the walls inside orthodox monasteries. Unfortunately, we lack the meaning that en(dis)ables the understanding of the content. Interpretation was definitely changing in time in space, as it was shown in Sreten Petrović’s theory on the revival of the old faith in new conditions.

I am afraid that the meaning of those stories included in the folk pattern is perhaps lost forever. That leads to the conclusion that my current occupation with art is an internal effort to, using words – motifs from traditional rugs, visual language of the ancestors, with meaning unknown to me, tell a story which meaning I don’t understand myself to try to revive the lost connections. These paintings are non-verbal stories, fairytales of the lost sense of our ancestors who found a way to overcome the time and once more mumble the lullaby in our modern ear.

My fine art expression is conditioned by the structure of the own inner content. I accept the fact that there are clusters of joint concepts of different origins which are mutually, analogously connectable. In my opinion a character of a person and personal affinities isolate and connect concepts of different areas in their own way, creating that apart from archetypally strong pictures, each person has his/her personal and unrepetitive cluster of important tastes, smells, stimuli, melodies, pictures, stories, adventures which are more important than the others and in which one recognizes something in common.

Because of that, in my paintings I work with a system of graphic motifs, created in advance, that has a neutral relationship towards the concepts, and equal incompatibility with any one of them. The choice of traditional motif as the bearing syllable of visual sentences I imply to my own inner and non-verbal mythology which has its roots in the rich heritage of our ancestors.