The Face of a Reverse: In Memoriam - Krsto Andrijašević

You should take a good look at the portrait he dedicated himself to in his time. Krsto Andrijašević so it will be seen that he can be understood, first of all, as the face of a reverse. I mean that the face that we see in his drawings and sculptures, that most often very distressed, very defeated and desolate face, emerged from a reverse that Andrijašević examined very precisely in his previous sculptures and, naturally, included it in the artistic calculation on the basis of which he then created new portraits, group portraits, landscapes and similar works, so that these works can be understood as the reverse of the reverse.

It is worth recalling that in that previous sculpture - the portrait, in that first reverse on which everything else in this art is held, the surface of the head (and with it an entire sculptural tradition) was abandoned and a breakthrough was made into its interior. In a way, it was a transition from physiognomy and cosmetics to neurosurgery. At the same time, it was also a transition from the anatomy of the body to the anatomy of consciousness, to paraphrase Dada Đurić.

Let us therefore look at the discoveries that have emerged from this kind of “anatomy” and “neurosurgery” and take as an example, in this sense, first, the “man with the mullet”, that is, the apparently very intellectual person with the cap in whose head, transparent as if it were a glass jar, there is ordinary water on which a ping-pong ball floats. This is, without a doubt, one of the possible understandings of the mental process called “thinking” (it is in fact the study of the human mind) and, as one among other understandings, it is quite appropriate. Moreover, we should also think about the possible advantages of this theory, since it seems to me that, as a theory of mind, “ping-pong” contains important implications. Thus (for example, from the sculpture “Orwell’s Man or Casanova”) we see that the place of the ball can be taken by a doll, precisely one of those dolls that, as we know, many heads fantasize about.

And then many other things come into play. With his “neurosurgery,” Andrijašević was actually on his way to expanding the circumference of his head to the point where he could encompass everything that exists in the world and, in that way, pull the entire world into his head. But we see that he refrained from doing so, and I assume that this is because he wanted to be precise and true to the truth. For if he had had a jar as the subject of his research, and then viewed the jar as a head, Andrijašević would, I believe, have placed incomparably more things in it than he did. But since his subject and artistic problem is not a jar, but rather a head instead of a jar, everything becomes significantly different - because the head, viewed as a jar, allows the artist to, while adhering to the facts, select a very limited number of things, and he selected them so carefully and precisely that we cannot see any reason for exultation in the difference between a full and an empty head. In other words, the things that were found in these heads (not to mention jars) to provide an accurate description of human nature make up pretty much everything... And the archaic shapes of all those busts on which these heads are held are supposed to confirm that everything has always been exactly as we see it now in them.

And that is why the faces to which, following Andrijašević's masterful hand, we return, those faces whose heads are filled with all those trifles and trifles and so many banal contents, must be, as we said, so miserable, so defeated and infinitely desolate, and the contact between them, devoid of imagination and any enthusiasm, must, as we see, be a kind of mockery.

And that is why every human situation, as we see here, contains within itself that sign (or sign of horror) whose only certain meaning can be expressed by the term “after defeat”. And that same terrible sign (or sign of horror) can be seen breaking through the tame as well as the wild landscape: in Andrijašević’s landscape, one also feels that dangerous potential, as the potential of nature or the potential of man’s fear of nature, no matter. And how this dangerous potential of man and nature overtakes and collides with each other, we see for example in the drawing “Devil”: whether this is a face or its absolute absence (not to say its reverse side) is a very serious question.