Time Resurrected

The unrepeatable time of a human life is fascinating in its ambiguity and as such it becomes the subject matter for the infinite number of my artistic pieces. This conundrum was first addressed in my Master Thesis entitled Spatial Relationships within an Artwork, which was introduced as an ambient exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in 2011. The past times living in each human being, broadening and growing within, represent the essence of my art. I focused my creative energy to the resurrection of past moments, which deliver an inner sensation of timelessness, something virtually eternal. I draw my artistic force from the refusal to forget and the ability to imagine the manifold concurrence of destinies. The omnipresence of the endeavor to understand dying, all those lives representing in fact concealed deaths are a drive to my creativity. The existing life is only possible due to our mind’s ability to forget and its faultiness. My imaginary life is a creation of live memories storing the entirety of the torments I endured. My artworks could be categorized as a schematic expression of my inner life and all of its dramatic turbulences. They thusly become a holy space, a grail where I strive to establish a relationship with the people I tragically lost. Tragedy teaches me how to conceive my own freedom and act on that basis.

The starting point of my doctoral artistic project was the formation of an ultimate “time piece” made by a vast number of live truths, from which everything redundant and unnecessary is eliminated. I created a unique live time of art, building it from the indifference of the times flowing around us. The project cannot be categorized as a collection of memories, owing to the fact that the continuous timeline of events and the indication of personal names within the piece itself is fully abandoned. The introduction of ourselves into our own artwork represents in fact the eradication of boundaries between the fiction of the picture and the external reality. The existence of our past in present times is only possible because everything from our past is experienced simultaneously and identically in our present. Sheer remembering as a type of spiritual memory is translated into a cycle of paintings projected by 3D technology, thus creating a parallel reality, the reality where time has resurrected.

In the first part of the paper (Research Framework) the characteristics of time itself as a concept are presented. Time is interpreted through the prism of various religions and myths as timeless realities. The relationship of sheer memory to art is observed. The work with time in visual art is presented through vivid examples closely relating to the subject matter of my doctoral art project.  This is followed by the dissection of the artistic piece from a philosophical approach, through the painting’s spatial perception, all the way to the Artist’s relationship to the artwork on the one hand and the observer’s on the other. The research is rounded up by offering a definition of the contemporary multimedia environment, how it is created and its trends.

The second part of the thesis (Methods and Results of the Artistic Research Work) contains an explanation of my creative procedure and a presentation of the cycle of paintings along with the video and audio work, which have been presented as my doctoral art project in the Progres Gallery in June 2016 in Belgrade.

My artistic exploration comprised the search for an artistic expression in the presentation of my resurrected time paintings through various work procedures employed in the pictures themselves, as well as in the audio-visual work, along with the examination of the prospects of common techniques, analyzing new possibilities as to materials and procedures, color selection, the intertwining of traditional techniques and contemporary technological solutions.

The result of my work on the selected subject and the manner of artistic expression is the creation of a piece of ambiance art creating my own resurrected time with a tendency for it to become a spiritual antidote for social poisons, a kind of an aesthetic alternative to moral nihilism. I endeavored to move the boundaries of existing qualities of visual arts by an inventive approach to artistic expression. Installing myself as an individual in relation to other people represents a procedure of self-shaping, the ultimate goal of which is to reach absolute creativity.

Collaboration with Sanja Žugić, Saša Ristić Krieger,Marko Vuleta Đukanov, Vladimir Korać, Antonije Živković, Radojičić Skubi, Vladimir Kostić, Aleksandar Ramadanović.