DOCUMENTS OF THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

by Božidar Bošković

At some stage of our existence we all make an effort to recapture the elusive memory of certain events in our childhood, trying to piece together fragments of our earliest part of life. For a while now, Dejan Kaludjerović has been achieving this quite well through his paintings, photography and installation.

Like in many of his previous work, Kaludjerović continues to use documents of the past, in this particular case a page out of a Burda magazine from about twenty years ago and places it in a new context, recreating and giving it new meaning. Isn’t that what serious art should be doing – making the familiar strange, via an imaginative angle of vision.

Placing a work on canvas beside a digital piece, the artist confronts us with both a static entity embodied in a fixed essence of a painting, and a dynamic becoming of ephemeral appearances that is translated into a video. The layering of the painting begins with a silver pigment, acting as a primer onto which grids of cartoon characters are added. The form and outline of the children account as the final layer of the picture.

The same scenario that preoccupies the artist in the painting becomes replicated through a filmic quality. The rendering of motion and duration along with expressions of extraordinary psychological states are captured in the faces of the three children that are represented in the video “No fear of small creatures/animals” During the performance of the video one eventually notices the twinkling of the eyes, the occasional twitch of muscles or minimal changes of a pose. By using light directly to convey the image the artist discovers an expressive attribute that is relative to time. The ability to split time into segments and reconstitute them within the actual flow of the present moment is unique to video.

It is the actual moment when a photograph is being shot that the artist aims to capture through the medium of video. Kaludjerović is concerned with the split second when the camera clicks, arresting the most perfect moment that has been anticipated for a while. It is at that point that the participants culminate in their most beautiful, natural or seductive pose. The staging of this very moment is of interest for Kaludjerović and the manipulative aspect that comes along. By translating the photograph from the catalog onto a canvas the painter extends the life cycle of the given setting. By recreating the same scenario onto a video, the artist makes an intervention, where the instant when the children are supposed to be the prettiest is being prolonged. In a way this might be a test as to how long is one able to hold the “most excellent posture” and for whom. At the same time Kaludjerović reveals the fakeness of this Thespian situation.

Rather than implying the distance between the two different media, there is a collision between these subjects. A certain kind of mirroring reflection emerges and one can speculate a space of friction, where the inherent qualities of a painting get confronted with those of a video.

The narrator/painter/videographer makes the viewer to possibly take into account one’s own recollection of early youth and what it signifies. Through an extraordinary series of mental adventures the past can be recaptured – not merely remembered but totally recalled and become, in the process, art.

The chronological order of narrative is often subordinated in the work of Dejan Kaludjerović. Materials, situations and moods get rhythmically balanced against one another to create a pattern which does not depend upon the order of time but upon the sense of recurrence. But what does all this mean to us today? It translates into our obsession with time and the need to escape its tyranny. The only way we grasp the present is through the recovered past, good or bad, implying for a better future. The children that are replicated on the painting are adults now and they were once the future of their parents. The children in the video, generationaly-speaking might be the offspring of the people in the original magazine, becoming the future of today.

As an artist, Kaludjerović tries to solve the problem of how to bring to attention important parts of the past, like childhood, and establishing its importance and relation to the present. So how does he solve the problem? There is a bridge between the realms of the past and the present and that is memory. But memory collects, rather than joins together and what it gives us is a bag of detached and dissimilar fragments, but at the same time it is the only instrument we posses to recreate time.

Kaludjerović’s vision is not of a world abandoned by a future, but one that yearns for a certain past that still exists behind the new façade of transition. Remembrance and representation constitute a model that also relates to history. Neither a state nor any organized society can simply allow memory to happen, it gets constructed through collective memory. In The Cultural Memory, Jan Assmann demonstrates that memory is always the result of a social process, a practice led by the elites of the state.

Kaludjerović frames his personal memory through his artwork, how will the new elites of today demonstrate the social memory rest to be seen.