Oliver MišuraAnte Duraković / Consensus

The artists Ante Duraković and Oliver Mišura presented themselves to the Split audience with the exhibition Consensus.  The two authors with the similar artistic poetry have met by accident in the Department of painting in Art Academy of Split, and their friendship endured after graduating the college and it resulted in this exhibition. The independent exhibition of two authors doesn’t present any novelty or rarity, but unlike those, in which the artists are confronted in one place, based on their differences in medium or by methods of expression (for example cycle One on one in Gallery of Fine Arts). Duraković and Mišura on this occasion adopt a collaborative practice where, with few of their own, create and exhibit works produced by mutual interventions on common canvas. By the relativisation of recognizable handwriting or both artists, the question of authorship becomes secondary, which coincides with visual and semantic values of an analytic part, or primary painting in which both authors are engaged with.  In their artistic work, two painters are leaning to the Greenberg formalistic tradition of autonomic art in which the painting is interpreted as the independent entity determined by its own visual language, or points of reference determined by the material, color, line, shape, and composition.

Between the existing points, Duraković and Mišura also include terms such as background, painting as an object and stratifications, by their own words, are primary concerned with “imagery”; they are deconstructing the painting by its meanings and recognize its fundamental factors to be subsequently, individually and subjectively, interpreted and in this case joined in one wholesome. Ultimately, author’s self with the full conscience is    diluted and shadowed by the role of mediator which artists take on themselves to enable the inner nature of painting to be better expressed, making every one of them unique and singular visual events. Between the countless examples of the artist’s cooperation that were noted on the pages of literature, from the history of art the first that comes to mind is one, although barely conducted, between Rauschenberg and De Kooning, but in this case instead physical erasure of representation, it is more of a symbolic erasure of unique artists authority or limitation of the scope of individual artist in the process of composing the painting. Such renunciation is the reason how the consensus from the title of the exhibition is accomplished, and hence it enables the painting to be revived by freedom than if it was a work of just one author. By acting primarily from the back, on the   B side of the painting (Duraković is led by the gesture and Mišura by the feeling) artists stress out the independence of the representation created on the canvas surface from any outside interventions.

Consequently, they release it from the stability that is usually the result of composing the visual contents by the determined laws, and thus the complexity and applicability of the paining’s entity are clarified, what is the main determinant of every being in the universe. The elements of artistic language are applied on the reverse, that is, other sides of picture subtly comes to the surface and are more hinted, than being recognizable as concrete shapes. Thus, the secretive metaphysic component of the artworks is released.

As the result of Duraković’s and Mišura’s cooperation the new pictorial forms are established whose fundaments lay on the study of the relation between the universal significance of the painting and the insignia that derived from it and also the application of the acquired knowledge used in the creation of new paintings. By recognizing the different methodology used in the process of paining’s creation the limits of reading the artwork are dissolved and the observer becomes the third subject during the reception and construction of the artworks meaning. This shows the intertextual nature, or the method of the artwork’s interpretation, the one that is read out so well on some examples in postmodernist philosophies, such as the discussion on Van Gogh’s Shoes from 1886. (Shapiro’s reaction on Heidegger’s interpretation of the aforementioned artwork symbolism and, additionally, Derrida’s intervention into Shapiro’s and Heidegger’s views on it).

Conclusively, the exhibition reflects the ability to process the artistic activities by presenting the individual and cooperative artworks. Unlike their previous artistic practice which was generally strictly determined by geometry, figuratively and compositionally, Duraković and Mišura are, in this cycle, slowly crossing in the lyric of spontaneously arranged contained and mild forms. They are just hinted on the surface of canvases and emanate metaphysical force which becomes the part of every representation that comes to the material world. Minimalistically measured and visually attractive, their works become the icons of complex substance and discover the limitless possibilities of the artistic language utilizations.

 Božo Kesić