Adam and Eve Painting

Jelena Minic is a young painter, one might say - a typical representative of her generation who is aspiring to justify the meaningful dimension of her picture by her own rules. And that painting does not tolerate firm definitions: it can be explained neither by concepts of classical visual artistry, nor historic parallels, nor by post-modernistic principles without detriment to its own plastic integrity. Jelena Minic aspires towards a painting which is a process, a rhythm, a dynamism and an action. She tries to identify an idea, a perception, an emotion, an act and artistic material. She endeavors to express herself directly, without paying much respect to the existing language models, to the possible relation between the reality of the world and that of the painting. At first sight it might seem that Ms. Minic gives priority to a  typically modernistic presentation based on the on the collage technique. However, if that  process is present here it is understood in quite a different sense from that ascribed to it by the cubists, surrealists or new imagists. Her collage is a differently based visual game: it is a combination ( synthesis?) of practically all known disciplines of visual art. It is least of all a process which, by fragmenting specific visual image ( of specific semantic and symbolic structure) creates a new, essentially different vision. The connection between the pattern and final outcome is hardly visible in the painting. At one stage Jelena Minic's paintings are a result of almost classical way of painting ( the preparation of the foundation, application of layers of paint ) only to become, with the aid of  non-painting materials, glue, collage details taken from other paintings, a unique field in which the physical world is finally transformed into the emotional and imaginative ones. In this way the canvass is finally transformed into a rich, multilayered surface which is pulsating with a new, extremely subjective, plastic energy. What makes this method of work so special? It is primarily in the way of thinking and understanding the essence of the phenomenon of visual arts. Ms. Minic is "collaging " different  layers of reality ( from different times ) in the inner  space of her paintings - fragments of some former ( historically confirmed ) conceptions - " quotations " - which she is transforming with her forcible intervention  into new meaningful facts borrowing some of e.g. Rauschenberg's  or De Biefve's principles in that process.