HRVATSKA UDRUGA LIKOVNIH UMJETNIKA

CROATIAN ASSOCIATION OF VISUAL ARTIST

Tanja Dabo & Letricija Linardić / Zajednički nazivnik

30. march - 12. april 2016. in Salon Galić Gallery

No One is Innocent

On a global level, it is obvious that accelerating moral decline, especially its reflection in daily life and its national variations, mobilises artists that consider ethical discourse an important aspect of act of creation to continue and further develop historically prominent activist line of post-conceptual artistic practice. However, while former generations’ activism was directed towards support and articulation of new levels of democratic outlook and system, a sharp turn in global outlook discourse towards conservative and neoliberal values puts contemporary artistic activism in the position of defence of achieved societal and personal values. Letricija Linardić and Tanja Dabo exhibition comprises a wide range of artistic reactions to complex reality: from explication of attitude towards selected artistic discipline and its craft aspects, as well as the experience of oneself in the clash between life vocation and professional affirmation in Tanja Dabo’s artworks, to the reflection upon current societal entropy phenomena in Letricija Linardić’s work. In short, we can say that their artistic credo is based on sincerity and self-reflection; the means of their art is word, and unorthodox application and transfer of classic printmaking discipline to the multi-disciplinary standard of contemporary art is their artistic method.

For those who do not know, Dabo and Linardić belong to the same generation of artists. They spent their education and began their careers in the surrounding of Rijeka Printmaking School, contributing to its reputation with their success. High metier skill and professional level, inclination towards expressive richness of achromatic field and courage obtained in an open system that directed them towards a wide field of contemporary artistic practice expressive possibilities are the things they inherited from this school. Judging by the freedom of departing and returning to their primary artistic discipline, both artists are typical representatives of generation that entered the scene at the very end of the previous century. Their generation, at least a part of it similar to them, in articulation of individual forms of expression felt closer to or was more influenced by the neo avant-garde artists of the seventies rather than their immediate predecessors that, alongside creative freedom, hedonistically took pleasure in the return to traditional artistic disciplines, figuration and art history as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. This property of their work at the Split exhibition is most visible in the use of words as basic channel of communicating messages, the thing that Dabo and Linardić owe to conceptual artists. By using words as paroles, Tanja Dabo’s Atonement cycle, seemingly unskilfully made using uneven letters, invokes Željko Jerman’s iconic transparent This is not my world (1976). But, this is where every similarity ends.

Unlike Jerman, but also thanks to him, Tanja Dabo in her multimedia artistic practice, within which she conducts systematic societal and institutional critique, built a successful professional career and secured the position of academic professor. The return to her primary artistic discipline therefore signified personal need of questioning the righteousness of her own artistic decisions, becoming a critique of rigidness of position within professional association marked by printmaking artists’ unwillingness to experiment in other artistic areas. The form and content of the “naïve” paroles have been made using physically demanding lithography technique so, evoking almost medieval passion for repentance for sins, Tanja Dabo in this cycle “repented” in the eyes of orthodox professional association colleagues and cynically confirmed her right to be regarded as and called printmaking artist.

A slightly bigger problem and numerous media reactions have been caused by her second artistic cycle Unpleasantness, Anxiety in which she, in an uncommonly frank and public manner, expressed her thoughts, personal doubts, problems and creative blockade experienced during her pregnancy and first year of motherhood. As the role of conservative outlook in our lives increases, female gender feels a sensitive question of demography, motherhood and right of having professional career with a new intensity and psychological mechanisms, regardless of the fact that real life standards make business career of a woman an imperative. Between personal motivation and external imperatives, Tanja Dabo found creative solution in narration, expressing her feelings in first person. This return to the narrative form so popular in the twenties leads me to conclusion that her medium for the same narrative would be a still video frame where she would stare and speak to us using the same words. She communicates that message, perhaps more effectively, using her primary printmaking medium on pages containing clearly printed texts, ascetically bound in the artist’s book. Page by page, we slowly enter the process of the artist’s catharsis and the beginning of a new phase in her career.

Letricija Linardić’s artistic work is not based on personal discourse; however, it expresses a very clear attitude towards moral bankruptcy in contemporary Croatia. Paroles and Indulgences cycles refer to acute problems of our society such as unemployment and corruption, simultaneously reflecting perverted idea of a better society that is realised in its oppositeness. Unlike Tanja Dabo, who returned to making prints on paper, Letricija Linardić integrated printing techniques into installations that conjoin diverse materials and step out into the third dimension. In these artistic cycles printmaking is only one of the disciplines, despite the possibility of reducing visual qualities of installation segments solely to the expressiveness of printing techniques. Messages are numerically and terminologically very precise. Regardless of our knowledge about the problematic, its transposition into aesthetically perfect form – that in our conscience is still predetermined for representation of the ideal – is revealed in new and impressive way. Thus, for example, the narcissism of political phraseology is reflected in the same way printing matrix is used to print a mirror symmetry image intended for our view. In the end, offering boxes which are a part of the Indulgences installation are offered to visitors and the need to redeem our sins as participants in the moral decline. No one is innocent.

Finally, there is another characteristic that needs to be highlighted, pointing to cultural and moral foundations of the two artists. Atonement, anxiety, indulgence, unpleasantness are terms taken from Christian outlook on the world. It is the one in which ethicalness based on forgiveness, tolerance, aid and acceptance of our neighbours and others is integrated. In our dominant conservative ideology, these values are contentless phrases and form. Christian socialism that calls for structural change in Christian social principle, alongside combination of basic socialist aims with religious and moral Christian teaching, today seems equally far away as well as the bogey called socialism that “circulated around Europe”.

 

Branko Franceschi

 

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