Josipa Štefanec & Ivana Vulić / Dark black

Dark Black is an exhibition featuring two artists that use object known as “painting” differently. Firstly, they express themselves in different media, and secondly, they approach the term “dark black”, the blackest of black, each in their own way.

It is the deepest of the dark colours, full, distant and beyond reach, only a vague reflection of our existence, frequently associated with magnificent space we are a part of, and which we like to talk about as something related to us, surrounding us. Scientists have recently discovered that space begins at an altitude of 118 km above the sea level… Aware of that fact, which is a result of contemporary, “rational” age, we may enter the space of Josipa Štefanec’s sculptural installation, Velcroland, where Velcro draperies are intertwined with blind-rams that support them, and with objects, people, and phenomena surrounding them. Everything becomes a part of chaos, the black hole that sucks in and reflects. In that parallel universe, we are all specks of dust, gathered together. In the real universe, we continue to observe this spatial installation, which has already covered the walls of various exhibition spaces before. Each new mode of display makes it a new ambient sculpture. Velcroland can rarely be displayed twice in the same way; it almost makes the chaotic state neutral because different parts of this installation, paintings flipped front to back, never create a unique shape. Chaos becomes a sort of order, because it is the only thing that was and can be created again. There is no pressure here and space for expression is constantly present. It can be found in the abstractness of the composition, in a dark, almost suprematist blackness of the square, i.e. sculptural wooden crosses at the very back of the painting. Crosses seem monumental, slightly threatening, and become the only comprehensible symbols in the abstract composition, symbols of our (de)humanisation. From afar, Velcroland almost floats in some state of weightlessness, spreading and occupying space much broader than the gallery space. As Lucio Fontana wrote: in space age, spatial art. Therefore it is not surprising that it was him who intervened into painting and canvas as an object and transcended the boundaries of painting as a two-dimensional surface. In regard to Josipa Štefanec and her transformation of paintings into sculpture and Velcro into canvases, it needs to be mentioned that the author is a textile designer, so that’s where the Velcro comes from. This “design standard” in the context of Velcroland as a metaphysical spatial installation seems kind of absurd, even sarcastic. What is the purpose of art, a traditional medium such as painting (especially in this age of new technologies!), the artist seems to wonder. Painter Ivana Vulić tries to answer this question. Her style has changed throughout her career, but she remains faithful to the exploration of deep secrets of human psyche. Back in the 2010, at the Psihomp exhibition in K. Stanković Gallery in Zagreb, via abstract landscapes in which occasionally specific symbols shined through, author dealt with the relationship between conscious and unconscious, and now she returns to the same topic with artworks displayed at the Dark Black exhibition. The darkest of black almost stems out from the Insomnia installation, along with the dress she weaved herself from modern thread composed of old audio tapes, “rewinding” time during this slow and precise action. By recycling this material, the artist pays homage to the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and not only to outdated technology of recently passed decades, but also to her growing up years. By combining thread and insomnia in one of her artworks, she questions her female identity and, similarly to contemporary Parka, she weaves at night, dealing with already defined destiny she is trying to reinterpret. It is a ritual, a magical act. Audio tapes and little holes on the dress seem related to the feeling of slipperiness, perpetual motion and change. Insomnia is quite nervous, elusive, influenced by the Moon which occupies large part of the exhibition space.  The artist paints the Moon during different phases in a flickery, almost impressionistic manner. She considers the Moon to have a double meaning – it can be comprehended as a symbol of reason, a unit of time, so it becomes in a way equal to the act of dress weaving. On the other hand, it represents the intuitive and symbolic, and that which is concealed by insomnia, forgotten in this age of rule of science. As Mircea Eliade wrote in the Images and Symbols book: symbol reveals certain aspects of the human reality –those deepest aspects – that resist any other aspect of knowledge... Just like mythological communities related, on a symbolical level, some animals to the Moon (cats, snakes, frogs, spider, wolves, rabbits, etc.), in the same way the artist creates her own symbolic meanings, related to bees, cats, female demons with a body of a woman and a head of a donkey. Although Dead cycle, series of watercolour paintings / drawings of (dead) birds, is not related to the Moon, in this context these realistically presented birds gain symbolic, melancholic meanings in relation to the Earth’s satellite.

In the end, we can return to the space beginning at the altitude of 118 km above the sea level and imagine the darkest darkness, the fear itself. Dark Black exhibition is coloured with this tone of unpleasantness. However, it is the one that, through the intuitive, points out that all of it is the part of the same thread, and that without the symbolic dimension, as Blake and Jung state, human being cannot reach wholeness.

Neva Lukić