Expense of liberty Painting

Dark matter and embossed mass, as the title of Ervin Kadić’s exhibition, might suggest, are not mere forms of description of a first visual impression of the exhibition, but concepts that point towards a whole spectrum of positional, artistic and social-political dimensions that permeate through and that are carried by this exhibition. The first of these dimensions is entailed in an antagonistic position this exhibition, i.e. works it consists of, take against a long-lasting tendency within the painter and/or artistic mainstream present in the town of Bihać and attached local scenes. Hence, this exhibition radically distances itself from the dominant practice of landscape painting and attached pseudo-impressionist trends on the said scene(s) that deal with the same approach for decades, which resulted in a mass of color-saturated replications of landscape topography of local-patriotic pedigree. As opposed to relying on attempts at mimicking natural coloring and producing art as a vitalistic discourse, Dark Matter/Embossed Mass takes another direction and, by discarding both the color saturation and said vitalism, actually discards art as a reflection of the natural environment and its “picturesqueness” — producing it instead as a self-sufficient subjective visual discourse. Differently put, and as opposed to relying on what was already “given,” i.e. made outside the confines of the author’s intervention, this exhibition produces the visual, that is, artistic content as a direct effect of subjective artistic intervention. This break-up with landscape art and pseudo-impressionism is, of course, important on the aesthetic level and on the level of the production of new visual discursivity, but it is also extremely important in terms of rejection of an implication entailed in a natural-centric art (and petty-bourgeois ideology) that the artist is merely an agency of aestheticization of that which already exists. In the same sense, the conceptualization of the exhibition’s layout in terms of placing the works in space, instead of on the walls, has a triple function. As first, this layout subordinates the gallery space to the exhibition i.e. works themselves in a manner that emphasizes a logic that states that art procures relevance to the gallery, not vice versa. As second, the uniform-like layout of the works in space and intentional, “totalitarian-like,” conversion of the space sarcastically replicates totalitarian tendencies that are turning art towards the market logic and towards becoming a commodity, as well as it, on a symbolic level, represents a rejection of exhibition becoming a passive component of the interior. As third, this layout subverts classicistic petty-bourgeois habit of consuming art in a leisurely manner, as well as it subverts the possibilities of a congregation of an audience in the center of gallery space, which is an inertion that implicitly, and unfortunately, translates the audience into the main substance of an exhibition. So, the reliance on “deafening” black; utilization of textures in as the main generic substance of content and the spatial disposition of works that put art, not the gaze of the audience, into focus make a subversive, iconoclastic, punk-rock gesture of flipping the bird, not only to archaic and neoliberal (“urban”) primitivism dominant in the relation towards art in Bihać area but also to the auto-derogating ideology of de-subjectivization that reduces an artist onto a mere witness of the world as a supposedly unchangeable category.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:71 W x 64.5 H x 2.4 D in

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