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Roland
Bart once said that it would be an illusion to think that someone could
be remembered by everything he did in his life. Quite on the contrary,
the people that surround us often remember unimportant details,
fragments, bits and pieces - sometimes even something that doesn't have
anything to do with the real meaning of some document, picture or
gesture. That is the place where differences between the subjective and
objective map emerge. If the artist's role in society seized to be
shamanic a long time ago, if history and the development of technology
had deprived him of the possibility to be a court chronicler as well as a
court jester, at least he kept one privilege for him self to report to
the public about his own subjectivity. To present for inspection his map,
how ever it may look, whether it is made of comprehensible images and
symbols or hermetic and very personal ciphers.
The
series of paintings by Dejan Kaludjerović wasn't named
"Atlas" by chance. An Atlas is, as well all know, usually a
collection of geographical /but also historical, geological,
speleological, oceanographically and other/ maps. Mr. Kaludjerović's
paintings, created in the framework of traditional painting, with some
deviation regarding the media, are maps at least in two levels.
One
level of these paintings is very literal - the paintings are really maps
or at least collages of maps. That level of the painting constitutes the
basis on which the other painting is projected. Those other,
"main" paintings within the painting /portraits, scenes,
situations/ have an added level because of their duality. Those other
"maps" are, at one hand, intimate key points, metaphorically
said "stops of the cross" - the stages of growing up in
socialism. There is a part of experience common to all of us who lived in
that social order. The other level is "personal history" - the
artist is "present", he is "painted" on his
paintings, in various ages and surroundings.
Boys
and girls on the pictures, couples, are, on one hand, personal memories,
but on the other hand they are signs readable for everyone who shared the
ambient and segments of experience with the artist. On one of the
paintings is, for example, a popular brand of sardines which carries
inner contradiction - it is named Eva after the first woman, and at the
same time it's mascot is a masculine walrus additionally cloaked with
eminent male stereotypes of a sailor. One of the first "pages"
in the "Atlas" are a boy and a girl. They are, as well, coded
in two ways - it represents sexual differentiation, and also the
reminiscence of a very popular brand of chocolates "Brother"
and "Sister". On the next level this stereotype is even further
emphasized: girls /of course/ play with dolls, and boys /what else?/ with
weapons.
This
series includes sequences with Pioneer's neckerchiefs - a representation
of one of the most important socialist rituals of initiation into the
social community - as a place of interweaving of the individual and the
collective sphere. Interweaved layers of the "pioneers"
painting include transparent image of an eye which brings it's own
complex symbolism and revokes dimension of the absolute - "the eye
that can see everything". The increase of elements in the complex
narrative structure of Mr.Kaludjerović's series closes with the wedding
picture /paraphrase of the pictures that are usually hung for example
over the bed of newlyweds, showing the couple in an embrace/. The wedding
is a very strong archetypal image, but also some kind of stereotype. The
name of the painting - "Building of a Temple" - suggests that this is
the Gral towards which Kaludjerović's pictorial story gradually
leads. That is the reason why this series called "Atlas" is not
just a collection of neutral geographical maps, but a map of buried
treasure, a series of schematic and symbolic "instructions"
that leads to solution, reconciliation, totality.
Nevertheless,
under this complex and at the first glance almost innocent story, there
is another layer from which the future of this region, the ambient in
which "our hero" lives in, can be read. It is the blood on the
paintings that warns us that our private histories are still happening in
the surroundings where the theme about which the maps are informing us
are usually seen through the prism of stories about blood and land.
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