ARTS IN ACTION


https://doi.org/10.5005/jp-journals-11005-0020
Science, Art and Religion
Volume 1 | Issue 2-4 | Year 2022

From The Edge of the World


Branko Franceschi

National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, Croatia

Corresponding Author: Branko Franceschi, National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, Croatia, e-mail: branko.franceschi@nmmu.hr

How to cite this article: Franceschi B. From The Edge of the World. Sci Arts Relig 2022;1(2-4):249-252.

Source of support: Nil

Conflict of interest: None

Name of Artist: Zlatan Vehabović
Curated by Branko Franceschi
Venue: Art Pavillion, Zagreb, Croatia

If there were such a thing as a hodograph according to which it was possible to plan a successful artistic career in Croatia, then the case of the painter Zlatan Vehabović could serve as a perfect template. A decade after his degree at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, in which he is today an assistant lecturer in the Painting Department, his career curriculum consists of all the necessary stops of solo and collective exhibitions, cumulatively supplemented with awards, all in a gradual development up to his individual exhibition in the Art Pavilion, one of the peaks in the career of any visual artist in the Croatian cultural setting. Since this still young artist enjoys the unanimous support of both the professionals and the general public and is highly rated on the rather mysterious “now you see it, now you don’t” Croatian art market, as well as on the more concrete international market, it seems well founded to say that Zlatan Vehabović is a representative artist of the generation that came to maturity in posttransition Croatia. Now that the phrase has been written, since this, a social context that we tend to link experientially with a whole spectrum of negative values, painful occurrences, and discouraging existential and sociological phenomena, practically the absolute pits, this kind of status sounds neither good nor laudable. What is it like to be the most successful young artist in this kind of social and political context? What is it going to sound like, trusting the idea of the immortality of the work of art from a distance of 100 or more years? What is it apart from great talent, knowledge, spiritual and mental openness, industry and dedicated work, professionalism, and decent manners that are concealed behind the success of the (for these times) uncommonly congenial, cultivated and, to use a current idiom generally cool personality of Zlatan Vehabović? How in this kind of society, from a complex constellation of existence, was such a positive, gentle, and mindful person formed? Putting aside the personal quality and family background, of which I have no knowledge anyway. Notwithstanding the social environment, the character and work of Zlatan Vehabović give hope that for us, there is still hope. I don’t doubt that Vehabović literally shudders at this kind of observation, opining that a preface to an exhibition should be oriented to the work and not the persona of the artist. But the status of the artist being discussed, whose exhibition is being heralded, brings with it a degree of needful public appearance and puts him into the situation of becoming, even if unwillingly, part of the prism with which we constitute a picture of the time in which we live.

In consideration of the context of Croatian visual art in which Zlatan Vehabović operates, it is worth pointing out the global trends to which, in spite of the developing self-isolation, we have never been indifferent as a cultural milieu, not even today. Since Vehabović is by vocation a painter with that traditionally defined skill set and puts into practice his option for narrative figuration as a conceptual subject in the technique of oil or acrylic on canvas, he has fitted comprehensively into the global trend bringing this kind of conception of painting back into the focus of interest of the curatorial and art-critical professions, and accordingly, of gallery and museum program orientations. Of course, here we are referring to the previously dominant interest in media art and derivates of the painting of high modernism, that is, the postmodernist return to the picture. Various theoretical positions proclaiming the so-called death of painting, which start off from the premise that painting is exhausted as an artistic discipline and medium for the representation of reality, have ignored elementary facts that will turn out to be crucial for the endorsement of the irreplaceable status of the picture in the area of culture in general. The public has never ceased being interested in painting; the best testimony to this is the results of the art market, in which the prices of the works of painting stars are smashing record after record. It is also incontestable that painting has, from the very beginning of civilization, been the most effective and most intimate manner of visual expression and, what is more, independent of any preconditioned exhibition space that only an institutional system of the presentation can provide. Most important, none of the theorists of the death of painting have ever asked artists for their opinion. Artists, however, have never in history had a wider selection of opportunities for expression. This relates not only to the available media and technology but also to the conceptual points of departure for pondering on and finding out their own versions of the presentation of the targeted contents that have been bestowed on them by the legacy of the iconoclastic avant-garde movements. In fact, it is the coupling of these factors—with the weariness and saturation that media art, and any art founded on technology, has reached primarily because of its dependence on gallery conditions of presentation, and abstract and postconceptual art because of the attendant hermeticism that requires the curator’s explanations—that has resulted in need of the artists to address figurative narrative painting as a self-intelligible form of expression. What uncritical encomiasts who see today’s narrative figuration as a kind of backward-looking tribute to the painting metier forget is the fact that the new generations of practitioners of artistic figuration in the creation of their visual vocabulary are more inspired by the documentary potential of media art and visual culture that the mass media have generated than by the rich history of painting. A generation that was to be trained in the middle of the first decades of this millennium, mainly at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, with respect to the conception of and the methods of working out their visual aspirations to a great extent modeled itself on European painting stars like Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, and Daniel Richter. With all due respect for their creative differences, all these artists, in the most important segment of figurative narrative painting, which is the visual narrative itself, draw on images that, in both the analog and the digital aspects of their activity, are mediated and archived by the global media machinery. These visual contents, with or without accompanying narration, have become the raw material handled by the creative personality of the artist. Employing the available arsenal of expressive possibilities, they fix them into the new reality of the painted composition, one that has a much more powerful iconic charge than that emanated by the originals. Although the escalation of charge is most obvious in painting cycles dedicated to concrete political references, the impressions that this painting has formulated represent current reality in dystopian visions, with an inner, often restrained drama, with feelings of unease, melancholy, and loss. Although among Croatian artists, there has always been a certain interest in the painting of figuration, in the second half of the last decade, a generationally uncommonly powerful production appeared one that kept up excellently with the trends on the international scene. This wave of figurative painters did not receive its confirmation of being an artistic phenomenon of cultural importance until 2013, and then thanks to the exhibition project of Feđa Gavrilović, an art historian close to them in terms of generation. The curatorially dubiously conceived exhibition, with its title New Croatian Realism,1 and Gavrilović’s advocating of the return to painting, perfectly worked out in marketing terms and almost ludic in intention, fitted on the one hand into the trend that in 2011, by insistence on the craft determination, was inaugurated by the Croatian Association of Visual Artists project Painting Biennial and on the other hand, alas, in the overall tide of regressive social trends that became a characteristic of the social quotidian.

Although artists are apt to disapprove when their work, always subjective, is subsumed into wider social phenomena or else is used to illustrate them, this is naturally unavoidable within the evaluation of individual oeuvres and wider general tendencies. At Gavrilović’s exhibition, in reports in the media, Vehabović figured as the most known among the painters of his generation. His painting Leviathan, done in the year of the exhibition, with its monumental composition and impeccable execution combining universal theme and exotic motif with semantic complexity and a powerful feeling of lethargy, vividly confirmed this status. Vehabović had, until then, particularly in works that joined textual narration with painted composition, previously attracted the attention and recognition of critics who were not necessarily positively inclined to figuration. This interest was helped by his currently inactive blog weakersoldier.blogspot.com, which presented him as a painter with literary potential, a person who had something to say, and who was able to mediate traditional visual art and narration with the multimedia modes of communication of the digital era. Still more intriguing to critics and curators was his interest in subjects and motifs that went beyond local experiences and the themes of his generation, for in content, his repertoire is paradoxically escapist, with respect to the local social content, and yet critical and activist with respect to global discourse. The cycles seem to have been inspired by situations at the edges of the world, areas in which the destructive consequences of human interference in the natural equilibrium were already apparent. The cycles Cursed Crew of 2014 and Foundations in Mud, 2015, do not present local life experiences. These are fictional narratives that are developed through a series of motifs from distant climes that are known to us thanks to the global media structure. The compositions are simple, rationally focused on the central motif, and painted drily, with an even, somber tone and subtle colorist transitions. Vehabović’s total control of the medium contributes to the same suppressed drama that the cycles are shot through with, and with them, he achieved in craft and narrative terms that balance of pleasure of eye and displeasure of spirit that had elevated his European exemplars and colleagues among the artistic stars. This painting then functioned equally well in the Lauba Gallery and in the Museum of Contemporary Art, and in New York, where, working with the Marc Strauss Gallery, Vehabović regularly exhibits.

Vehabović’s imagination, which confronts us with exotic locations, emanates a feeling of natural and immense spaces, the dimensions and forces of which are far superior to man and his constructions. This feeling makes him close to the landscape painting of the period of Romanticism more than to the modern version of the landscape. Still, while the Romantics showed nature as unknown, lush, exciting, and inexhaustible, in the expectation that it would be conquered by the predestined call of the human urge to subdue and exploit, Vehabović two centuries later faces us with the end of the process. The wilderness has been trampled down, if not absolutely defeated. The most distant stations of human dreams of the conquest of the unknown have already been abandoned, and from the distant points of the planet, the irrevocable answer of nature has set off, threatening the very heart of the anthropocentric world, the survival of the human species whose disappearance will drag narcissistically with it into the abyss of time the larger part of the animal and plant world. Ultimately nature is going to come back in triumph in some new form, indifferent to the conviction of the human species that it is its master and not just a maladjusted offshoot condemned at the outset to disaster. If we agree that this is the current Vehabović narrative groundwork and if we are aware of its topicality in the pre-apocalyptic reality of the expectation that nature will strike back, one has to point out that his compositions do not represent fantastic but real situations that, thanks to the global media network have become part of the collective awareness, and that, in consequence of apparent climatic changes, are rapidly approaching our physical world.

The previous Vehabović cycles were created on the basis of the interpretation of other people’s experiences transmitted into text and photographs. The exhibition Dark White Earth, conceived for the Zagreb Art Pavilion, was created pursuant to personal experience and photographic material that he took himself, thanks to his artistic residence in The Arctic Circle, the American-Dutch NGO, with its seat in Brooklyn. Artistic residences have become, in the last few decades, a mass movement that enables artists to have grant-assisted experience and exchange of ideas with colleagues from all parts of the world in a more or less organized setting, formed according to the capacities and visions of the founders. The Arctic Circle, as its very name says, enables a group of artists, the experience a controlled adventure cruising in the Arctic Circle as potential but not obligatory inspiration for artistic work. The utmost end of the journey is the Svalbard islands, which because of their peripheral geographical position, are, as to the members of the expedition, unfamiliar to us, would become an ideal subject for Vehabović’s dystopian vision of the world. In the Svalbard archipelago they are dominated by the austere natural surroundings, the equally obvious traces of global warming and failed and current human efforts to create conditions for existence, the regulation of complex political and economic interests directed at the Arctic area, and the establishment of some kind of cohabitation with nature. Vehabović’s compositions thus consistently oppose the human figure or its objects and constructions with the magnificent environment that, in the objective absence of habitual natural beauty, enchants with the savagery of the rock, the bare ground, the ice, the empty sky, and the sea. Vehabović used his own visual documentation to develop in the space of the Art Pavilion a kind of environmental narration that, as compared to the cycles produced earlier, conceived as groups of individual paintings similar in theme, technique, and dimensions, shows his ambition to create a complex spatially specific exhibition project. Having well estimated the spatial aspects of the pavilion, and particularly the feature that from the point of entry into its center, practically the whole of the exhibition can be taken in, Vehabović determined the development of a cycle and narration through a dynamic interrelation of pictures. The formats of the pictures are uneven in range, from monumental to relatively small dimensions in line with the inherent hierarchy of motifs, and their placement on the wall is defined in advance in precisely determined positions and heights, giving different angles of vision. For the production of this carefully prepared conception, Vehabović made a model that, on a reduced scale, simulated every segment of the exhibition. This method of preparation of an exhibition that, even before the actual process of the painting, determined the content and dimensions of every picture, its order, and position in the space, shows not only the rationality of the approach but also Vehabović’s ambition to communicate the contents of the exhibition to the public in as an attractive and functional a manner as possible. Successful 21st-century painting is not reducible to the studio, to the easel, brush, and palette. Nor can it be brought down a firm conceptual framework that will define its contents and formal aspects. Equal importance is assigned to the external production elements, and in this exhibition, Vehabović has placed emphasis on a sophisticated attitude to the spectacular space that has been confided to him for the exhibition. Thus, Vehabović has applied the kind of procedure to a painting exhibition that we have become primarily accustomed to when it is a matter of a multimedia exhibition and, in general, the program of environmental set-ups that Radovan Vuković featured during his term of office in the Art Pavilion at the same time as a project that under the title of Monumenta was being organized in Paris in line with the production conditions and the majestic architecture of the Grand Palais.

With respect to the painterly language, Dark White Earth brings into Vehabović’s regularly high-quality painting paradigm a formal new departure. It seems that the artist is himself fatigued with the one-way path of figurative narration, and in line with the dystopian character of motifs and theme and the freedom of disposition of visual templates, he decided on a procedure of collaging that puts into the construction of a realistic figurative composition an unexpected turn that is there to reinforce the semantic level of the work and the feeling of existential threat. The painted collage brings in dynamics and heterogeneity that excitingly develop the space of the painting, unlike the proverbial visual and mental monotonality of mimetic art. The lesson of the collage that we clearly have to recall every 100 years again is that painting, however much it might be realistic, is, in essence, a mental construct, totally abstract, and that the artist is a thinking subject who constructs his own vision of reality, conditioned by the talent to recognize for us, and faster than us, reality. Collaging visual originals has enabled Vehabović to take a turn toward surreal situations in which, for example, the motif of the landscape is materialized in the architecture of the colonizers of this unconquerable world, abandoned for decades, that thus at a symbolic level, brings back its dominance at a cost.

Dark White Earth presents us with Zlatan Vehabović as a mature artist who has completely mastered not only his selected discipline but all the conceptual, productive, logistical, and communicational aspects of artistic creativity that regulate and position an artist’s status in the current structure of the cultural context. Croatia has thus gained one more artist with whom we can compare ourselves with the great cultural powers. Visual art, thanks to them, is still one of our few successful export products. Hence this kind of exhibition, at the moment when the Law on Artistic Creativity is being drafted, should serve as one more incentive that in the synergy of all the stakeholders, the Ministry of Culture, artists, artistic associations, and public cultural institutions, in spite of the absence of private galleries and art managers, we can work on better conditions for visual creativity (Figs 1 to 4).

Fig. 1: Baldwin & Crouch, 2017. oil on canvas 183 x 290 cm sign. on the back: ZLATAN VEHABOVIĆ BALDWIN & CROUCH TAMNO BIJELA ZEMLJA 2017

Fig. 2: Galena Sarkofagen, 2017. oil on canvas 155 x 270 cm sign. on the back: ZLATAN VEHABOVIĆ GALENA SARKOFAGEN TAMNO BIJELA ZEMLJA DARK WHITE EARTH

Fig. 3: The Last Great Cadmium Red, 2018 oil on canvas 140 x 210 cm sign. on the back: ZLATAN VEHABOVIĆ POSLJEDNJA VELIKA KADIMIJ CRVENA - TAMNO BIJELA ZEMLJA 2018

Fig. 4: Lene, 2018. oil on canvas 280 x 200 cm sign. on the back: ZLATAN VEHABOVIĆ LENE - TAMNO BIJELA ZEMLJA 2018

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