If you allow yourself to get excited, imagine, take a walk and be happy and visit the exhibition "More pictures from today's walk" in the Modern Gallery in Podgorica until October 10, you will see just that - more pictures from today's walk and shots from everyday life that you missed while watching. into your mobile phone; disinterestedly passing along an already established route to a certain location; automatically walked along familiar streets that you no longer observe with interest and perhaps forgot how nice it was to be a tourist and in your own city, in the city where you live and work.
Joint exhibition Milena Vukoslavović i Srđa Dragović, life partners, and this time also spontaneous collaborators, deal with the perception and reflection of the immediate and inconspicuous space in their own way. The two of them see everyday scenes and areas in different, original and unique ways, photograph and remember them, and then transpose them into fantastic works of art. In an interview with "Vijesti", they point out that there is no place for social or political activism, engagement or messages in their works, but they only truly want to point out the beauty of the shots, which everyone can enjoy, if they open their eyes to it. Playing with the concept of everyday life, they emphasize that framing is done intuitively, by feeling, and that they find beauty in all corners and spaces.
"I think that in our daily communication, we all generationally lack fascination, childlike wonder, curiosity, and that is very important to us and that is a capstone to us in this space. The reasons for this are busyness and taking everything lightly, accepting 'for granted', trivializing, ignoring... I think we lack naive fascination in general", says Srđa, while Milena confirms and adds that this is the way of life that we all have somehow imposed and for which no one is directly to blame.
Although they depict scenes from everyday life, their works are anything but ordinary, and at the same time not at all pretentious.
"Each of these motifs of ours can be found anywhere and they can come from anywhere", adds Milena, explaining that they do not only show Podgorica, as many will think...
As soon as you enter the gallery, you notice the carefully designed concept of the exhibition, for which the curator, art historian was in charge. Ljiljana Karadzic, and with which the artists are extremely satisfied. On the wall on the left side, Srđa's works are displayed, a large number of them, and on the right hand side are Milena's works and alternating motifs. At some point of walking and observation, it seems as if their creations intertwine with each other, that individual works are a mirror of those across the street and that they arise from mutual ideas and inspiration...
"Still, it's not about collaboration, but I would say that Srđa's work influences mine, because we live and work in the same space. Certainly, the works are created independently, although Srđa often knows how to draw my attention so that something would work well as a painting, so I note it down and work on it", explains Milena, and Srđa continues:
"We are life partners, and in this case we are a completely accidental tandem, because we never planned in the author's sense to be a tandem. We work and live together in the same space, so it happens in parallel. These are stories that take place in parallel and have different starting points, stylistically, technically, poetically, but they look at each other and communicate well", adds Dragović.
Karadžić explained that Milena uses the photo as a template for the painting, while Srđa makes phone drawings, intervening directly on the photo taken by phone. However, both Srđa's and Milena's works at times seem to offer portals to the world of science fiction, just as we look at drawn elements on photographs or realistic scenes carefully and in detail painted with acrylic paints, which is additionally contributed by playing with light.
"I presented myself with about 30 pictures... I am engaged in the research of living space and the function of living space in everyday life and how it, taken out of context and deprived of any identity, functions as an independent work. The painting that I am currently engaged in has a basis in drawing and graphics, but exclusively from the aspect of observing the immediate environment. I do not find the starting point for my work, neither before nor now, in my imagination. I am interested in living space, objects in space, the meaning and significance of space in everyday life. For now, the paintings I'm working on are devoid of human figures. However, I don't see it as some kind of decision - you could say it's a kind of caution. Because for now, the most important thing for me is to keep my focus during the process, as well as the focus of the observer, on images that, despite the pre-determined loneliness, do not reflect closedness, isolation and anxiety, but silence, tranquility, melancholy", says Vukoslavović.
The works presented by Srđa Dragović, he explains, are part of an unplanned series of drawings that have been created exclusively on the phone for several years, through the application and through photos from the phone.
"From a technical point of view, these are phone drawings over phone photos. These are works that are created quickly, on the fly, without any predetermined or thought-out concept. Of course, I don't see this form of complementing a photograph or intervention on a photograph as some personal innovation and discovery: it's simply another way of recording, visually reflecting on space and reacting to space. "Interventions in themselves do not have a fixed form: sometimes they are extremely illustrative and with a humorous connotation, and sometimes they are minimal or follow up on the photograph in an unexpected form", emphasizes Dragović.
Equally dedicated to every detail and aspect of her work, Vukoslavović depicts seemingly everyday scenes so authentically that from a distance it looks as if they are photographs. Karadžić points out that Milena carefully chooses photos of subjects whose atmosphere is close to her feeling of the immediate environment and then translates them into poetic images with the characteristics of hyperrealism through a long-term, dedicated and patient painting process. But, adds Karadžić, her works do not merge into hyperrealism, because the hyperrealist painting technique demonstrates technical superiority and the virtuoso rendering of reality results in a cold, frozen, timeless scene.
"The depicted motifs (exteriors and less often interiors) are not only viewed mechanically, in the sense of easy identification of the painted objects and pleasing the eye, but the viewer is moved to a different position and his view is subtly contaminated and reshaped by seeing the artist. In a certain way, by choosing banal, imperceptible, unattractive spaces inhabited by ordinary utilitarian objects and objects as the starting point of her works, she creates a fine twist by melting trivial things and makes our experience of everyday life more intense and emotional", said Karadžić opening the exhibition.
She adds that Vukoslavović's paintings evoke sympathy and love for familiar, inclusive fragments of everyday life and then introduce the viewer to the zone of reverie, recalling someone's departure and absence, the sounds of the city, clattering dishes, children's laughter, car sirens or afternoon silence, as well as smells stale garbage, asphalt after rain, washed laundry.
On the other hand, Dragović intervenes and ignites the imagination with his documentary photographs.
"Like a sketchbook or an album of walks, visual records become silent witnesses of the interaction between the artist and the space. Interventions are sometimes prompted by the form of an object or scene, so they build on them, or are the result of a current mood and visual inspiration. Sometimes they are striking and dominate the work, and sometimes they are mimicked, hidden. Sometimes they are witty, humorous, at the level of jokes or riddles, and sometimes they are purely artistic. Thus, abstract lines appear in the drawings as a repetition of the contours of objects, banal everyday objects turn into animals, puddles become fantastic creatures, a little man hides under a fallen leaf or lies on a cloud above the city. Such delineations release and activate the hidden poetic potential of the scene," said Karadžić and concludes:
"With the easy, unpretentious transformation of the everyday, ephemeral into the artistic, Srđ has no ambition to explain the world, but rather, if we paraphrase Merlot Pontius, establish contact with the world and things”.
The phenomenon of walking
Ljiljana Karadžić notes that walking is an important starting point for both artists' works, so during the opening of the exhibition she devoted herself to the phenomenon of walking, the many purposes and reasons of which we seem to have neglected or forgotten to some extent.
"Many authors have dealt with the phenomenon of walking from different perspectives, and many artists have dealt with the performative aspect of walking itself. For the Dadaists, collective walking was subversive, for the purpose of criticizing social values, for the Situationists it was a way of exploring urban spaces, because they believed in psychogeography and the influence of a specific geographical environment on the inner state of man, for the land-artists of Richard Long and Hamis Fulton, walking is contemplative emptying of the spirit and receiving the direct influence of nature, and for Marina Abramović and Ulaj, walking is an act of spiritual practice and a test of human endurance (project for the Great Chinese Wall, 1988). Kant took daily walks, Proust found inspiration during strolls in fashionable city parks, flaneurism at the time of Baudelaire became urban legends, and Mahatma Gandhi's walk as an act of protest was politically effective. Perhaps the most interesting example is Nietzsche, for whom obsessive walking did not serve to relax, but was a prerequisite for mental work and inextricably linked with thinking. So, a disinterested walk affects the change of life patterns, mental and physical hygiene, 'expansion of the mind', conquest of freedom and life here and now with at the same time a sharpened and strange perception of the environment, as is the case with our artists, Milena and Srđa, Karadžić points out. .
Bonus video:
