IVANA DRAŽIĆ SELMANI I KATARINA IVANIŠIN KARDUM / (Non) personal

In spite of Delaroche’s statement about the death of painting, connections and interactions between painting and photography are greater than they seem in today’s age of multimedia. In the very beginnings visually weak photographic medium required considerable physical interventions; retouching, toning, montage even. Every change, upgrade in photo-technology in particular, led to a change in the medium of painting.

Soon after discovery of yet undeveloped medium, painters began to use it as a template of fixed reality. After a decade of mimicry, the heights of painting using photographic matrices were embodied in aesthetical changes introduced by the Modern period. Among those known to have painted from the positives were Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, frequently making their own ones.

It was Degas on the basis of his own negatives who introduced photographic foreshortening and the bokeh effect to the discipline of painting. Other elements of photographic image have been translated into pictorial one as well. Moreover, Scharf argues that visual flaws typical for photographic medium influenced the use of backlighting, strong contrast and width of the field in cubist paintings, demonstrating this on the example of Picasso’s photographs and pictures of Horta de San Joan.[1] However, most notable phenomenon in the trend of painting from photographs was Socialist realism, called by Groys «Primitive Photoshop»[2] because of its mass control of media.

As opposed to abstraction originating from photographic models, since the ‘80s photo realism has brought back representational power to the medium of painting, more so, deconstructing the medium of photography. Thus, images frequently display errors in pixelation, for example, in the work of Chuck Close, or bad quality photo print in the work of Goran Djordjević, both pioneers of painterly adaptation of glitch aesthetics to painting.

On the other hand, not exclusive to painting, some authors return to photographic archives, paradigms of the personal that become historical artefacts eventually.[3] This kind of focus is visible in the works of two Dubrovnik-based authors, Ivana Dražić Selmani and Katarina Ivanišin Kardum, featured together in the exhibition entitled (Non)personal.

The works of both authors are mainly photographs, albeit of different origins. While Selmani uses personal and vernacular photographs from the time frame between the beginning of the ‘30s and mid ‘50s, Ivanišin-Kardum approaches original black and white photographs of dioramas from the Natural Sciences Museum in Dubrovnik, arranged by Andrija Lesinger in the ‘60s. Using her own colour photographs that represent today’s state of the same motif, she translates qualities of photography into a medium of very different aesthetic qualities. In Dražić Selmani’s case, in terms of colour, black and white photographs are transformed into images almost exclusively limited to sepia, comprising strong contrast and clear shapes characteristic for early 19^th century photography, for example Rijlander’s montages, while Ivanišin-Kardum’s black and white photographs turn into black and white drawings, and colour photographs become watercolour paintings consisting of almost washed out colours.

By transitioning into paintings and drawings, original mechanic models are reverted to the aesthetic of the non-reproducible, according to Benjamin, auratic medium; the two are made equal again. Furthermore, objectivistic, in truth, not completely objective medium, is now subjectivised, translating artificial, technical and machine image into natural, continuous one, based on observation and hand movement.[4]

In order to tell between the two sources of paintings, the authors decode images originating from technical medium, i.e. industrial record and lead them to a personal, individual world of memory. They bring back technical images into space of the personal, regardless of whether it is the return of the individual to personal photography or appropriation of documentary photography.

Ana Peraica

Split, 2016.

[1]             Scharf, A.: “Painting, Photography and the Image of Movement”, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 104., No. 710. (May, 1962), pp. 186+188+195. See also; Peraica, A.: The Intermedialities of Painting and Technology of Photography, Some theories and examples. Creative Economics and Social Innovations, # 2 (11, 2015): p. 11-23

[2]             Groys, B. and M. Holein, Eds. (2004). Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era Traumfabrik Kommunismus: Die Visuelle Kultur der Stalinzeit, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Hatje Cantz.

[3]             Ivanišin’s work here irresistibly reminds of Sara Angelucci’s. See: Chhangur, Emelie (2015): Sara Angelucci: Provenance Unknown, Curator Art Gallery of York University, Toronto.

[4]             Currie, G. (1991). “Photography, Painting and Perception.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism #1 (49, 1991): 23-29.