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Once a memory is made or "caught", like a freeze-frame
from a concrete segment of life, it is just a new "screen
puzzle" that cannot give us a concrete answer or message.
If the dynamic of creating can be seen as trying to bring back to
life each individual memory and constantly striving to reach the
"inexplicable" moment - the moment an artwork comes to life,
then the melancholy induced by the constant fruitless striving to attain
the object of desire, or its "real" materialization can be seen
as creating yet another enigma.
When Dejan Kaludjerovic "selects" the images dating from
his childhood (newspaper clippings, children's books, family photographs)
and, in later stages of working, "hibernates" those images from
his past, he does not aim to reproduce them into a memory of his youth
and childhood nor does he aim to revive or criticize yet another
nostalgia belonging to the recent past. He, in fact, commemorates the
moment that could have induced a shock in his conscience as an observer
or active creator - a new producer of those images?-and with a specific
time distancing witnesses the enigma of the newly discovered visual
configuration.
Historically observed, the time of the artists' childhood already
belonged to the era of "factual violence" that spread over the
whole of the visual reality, the many layered ideological visual
manipulation and the fabrication of a visual matrix of ideal appearance
and behaviour.
The author becomes like a documentary maker or editor and through
adapting documents dating from 1970's reconstructs (within the specific
time frame and imagined subject matter) the fate of the unknown
protagonists. In this reconstruction specific entities exhibit the
appropriate rhetoric of gesture, gaze, caught in typical representational
compositions, belonging to the time they originated in (Still waiting for
the Man, 2001; What Did Tomorrow Bring Us?, 2001; Building of a Temple,
1999).
The artist's memories stop (or maybe just begin) with the artistic
process and with mapping the composition in a way that underlines the
specific hierarchy of the position and state of the impenetrable
exaltation of each individual character taken from "the documented
past". The painted canvas is most often a base layer of evenly
applied acrylic color over which a web of cartoons or comic books
characters is applied, like contemporary illuminated grotesques. The
final layer consists of carefully hand painted "main actors" placed
in the centre, gaining a saint-like aura, comparable to the meditative
process of painting a saints image but also to the ritual re-living of
the trauma/ the "screen memories", which take the recognizable
and already seen motives, in this case, recycle so much of the recent
past and transports (the viewer) into the subject of new doubts, fears
and the both sided feelings.
The Future Belongs To Us is an investigative cycle which most
subsequent develops the idea of the "screen memory"- understood
as the changing of the non-existent event into a kind of real tangible
memory, unpleasant to remember. The title itself is based on Bob Fosses'
Cabaret, to be precise with the slogan "The Future Belongs to
Me", which is sung by a young blonde Arian man at a gathering. Kaludjerovic's
world is filled with an army of children of a solid community, united by
the unique optimistic echo of Fosses' melodic lied - Strong Boy, Red
Girl, Smile, (2002-2004). Furthermore it is filled with the process in
which the individuals' memory is painfully broken down through the
inherited collective memory. The emblematic figure, marking the artists
continuing research into the collective preconceptions, almost
exclusively becomes the figure of a young man or child obsessively
repeating themselves in diverse iconic poses, like contemporary martyrs
of an amnesia-like projection of a better future without a past.
In his most recent work Bite a Carrot, Bunny! - Keine Angst vor
kleinen Tieren, (2004) the artist reconstructs the composition of the advertisements
from the 1980's through a particular approach- the confrontation of film
and the painted canvas analyzing the context of the evolution of
collective representation of "the innocent age" or childhood.
The taken mise en scène of children's games, when observed from
today's perspective induces uncomfortable feelings as it alludes to the
division of power and the social games of violence. The viewer is,
suggests the artist, a prisoner of the constant accumulation of a past
whose contents they cannot or wish not to unravel and the still
ungraspable future, one that doesn't give them the least hint in his
battle with the history.
Kaludjerovic, still, does not strive to read out the historical
streaming or decipher their configurations or propose "the right
way", to help the viewer in conquering the future. Here, the
creative gesture, in the best case, is flipped to tuning the viewer to
the complete phenomenon of visual reality, the complex relationship and
the time context that connects the viewer and the object exhibited, as
well as bringing back to life the enigma which transforms each individual
memory.
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