I'm leaving this title without a comma. I could have written The Big Bang, in color..., so to emphasize the explosion of space, or Big, burst of color..., so that I can emphasize the explosion of colors. Anyway, because even now I don't know for sure whether it's Night Sky (Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro; Perjanički Dom) an exhibition of paintings about explosions or colors, but I know that something big is at stake. Especially when this exhibition takes place right before the end of the world, which has long been announced Bruno Sulc in the story Book: "Soon we will run out of paint in our bowls, and shine in our souls..." (Bruno Šulc, Book, Contemporary World Story I, Prosveta, Belgrade, 1982, p. 33.)
No, I am not a catastrophist. I am not one of those who expect a bomb or an asteroid impact that will destroy the entire world in an instant. Like Bruno Schulz, I see the end of the world in the daily dying of the colors around us and the brilliance within us. That is why I claim that with this exhibition Tijana Gordic defies the end of the world, pouring colors into our vessels and brilliance into our souls.
Tijana is interested in the cause of the world, and it is, you will agree, a big topic. She set out to meet the universe at night, with holographic foil and acrylic paints, which is, without a doubt, a big challenge. And right where Tijana and the universe met, she made the light of the night sky condense into acrylic and shine again from her paintings, which, you will understand, is a big deal. These, among other things, when we talk about this exhibition, could be arguments in favor of the claim that something big is at stake.
With bits of space dust - scholars would say with a choice of materials - Tijana paints the universe in a state of dynamic circularity. This universe is not a wheel spinning in vain, stuck in the mud of the ether. On the contrary, she depicts it as energy flowing around galactic objects, like air flowing around the wings of an airplane, to give them lift, or like muscle fibers twining around a bone, to give it movement, to animate it.
Judging by her artistic handwriting, it is clear that Tijana works gently, patiently and impressively. The light in her paintings is not linear. She does not write her light writing from left to right, or vertically, as various peoples write. She writes it spirally, to more easily arouse spirituality.
A spiral is a circle that never meets itself. The spiral of Tijana's universe is a spider's web, on which in the early morning, instead of dewdrops, glitter from holofoil clings, twinkling like distant stars. In this visual vertigo, reason becomes clouded, and it seems that Tijana painted on the side of a large roll of canvas, or that a frame is superfluous to her painting, because even without it, it is easy to recognize the space bounded by the uniqueness of her painting style. In this illusion, the microcosm and the macrocosm unite fantastically, miraculously. Then Tijana's paintings are seen as a collection of cross-sections of the universe and its unrest.
Her night is not cold, but radiates with a color swollen from both sides of the visible spectrum, it pulsates, it is alive. The energy from the point in the center of the painting moves in the direction of the creative force that pulls her hand towards a field of wider radiation and meaning. That point is the support of her graphic construction and the center of gravity of the gaze. The way in which the other dots are arranged in the space of her paintings suggests that they are scattered according to some law of random improbability. They, like atoms, carry a charge of great energy and if they explode, they can create new worlds. When the lights are turned off in the gallery, Tijana's night sky catches the background radiation of the cosmos and shimmers to itself, as when we sleep.
Van Gogh he couldn't see cosmic storms, but he managed to (pre-)see them in a picture Starry Night. Tijana Gordić was never able to see some of the strange phenomena of our strange universe, but she painted them. Look at her paintings a little sideways, and you will see in a lateral perspective what is not visible in nature, but is present on her canvas: the closer the eye gets to the plane of the wall, the more the painting The spectrum of the night hidden magnetic fields are increasingly appearing, while in the picture Pulse of the night dark matter thus becomes visible.
When explaining the space-time continuum, physics teachers could show students Tijana's canvases. Let them compare the dimensions of the paintings and the time it took to paint them, and they will better understand how space is measured by elapsed time, and time by space traveled. Or, that the speed of light is the slow pace by which we measure the distances between stars. Parents who force their children to go to bed early so they don't miss out on sleep will realize when they see these paintings that their children can miss out on the entire universe. Sometimes it's better to use the sky as a mattress and the night as a sheet. And for those who can't remember the last time they looked up at the night sky, let them see how much excitement there is in Tijana's experience of such a vision.
Tijana plays with colors and puts glitter on her face, but not on her own, like little girls do, but on the face of some galactic abyss, to give it an expression of joy. In that radiance of optimism, you inevitably wonder, as well as Nietzsche's Zarathustra: “O great light of heaven, what would be your happiness if you did not have those for whom you shine?”
Bonus video:
