Between Words and Things
Between words and things, you never take sides.1
Alen Bešić
On both sides, like a brimful echo, in the irrefutability of time, things and words touch, inhabiting everything that exists inside and outside. A single insight abounds with presence that allows the very idea of a work of art to sprout to fruition immediately. In this context, artist Aleksandra Kovačević examines the ultimate role of space and its artistic purpose. The nature of space and its extension in all dimensions can be discussed at length, but what space is as a bearer of meaning in the relationship between the representational and the sensory is still to be explored and grasped.
Looking at some of the theoretical starting points in this regard, notably those provided by English theatre and film director Peter Brook, who wrote about treating any kind of empty space as an open stage, or American architect and writer Peter Eisenman, according to whom architecture is the most difficult discipline precisely because its essence is the activity of locating/placing (because it alternately integrates presence and absence), it is clear that Aleksandra Kovačević’s breath-timed poetics is akin to these principles, as a memorial to examining the boundaries and determining the extension of the notion of building an object. Metafictional in a way, the exhibition “Between Things and Words” is a refined selection of drawings, paintings, and art installations, the softest weaving and milky whiteness, but also, once and again, a path to a worldview revealed through minimalism. With incredible simplicity and through razor-sharp painterly visual procedures, Aleksandra Kovačević’s work invites a reading of transformational lines and harmony, as well as profound duration and density. Her sensibility, sincere and gentle, is revealed in the binding together of architecture and human being: the topics that the artist has been diligently addressing over a number of years. On the other hand, there is also the question of the character of forms and compositions, which are also given due distinction, as well as the consideration of constructive aesthetic principles and experiences in space. Finally — space, the (in)visible force, the house of human emotions and experiences, just like paper, canvas, wood, and brick, speaks to us as a hub of primordial bases-elements in the artist’s painting technology. Thus, space becomes natural motion and multifacetedness, ultimate reduction, unstoppable and inspired movement.
Wave-rolling is just a verb2 (even more so than space): an intimate need for spiritual refuge and for belonging. Such a position leads the artist to find home in everything she sees. For her, the world becomes a much more detailed and expanded place, the flow of an unstoppable line-form, while her memory and her recollections remain constantly vivid. Finally, just as in philosophy there is no matter without movement, space and time, Aleksandra Kovačević cannot position herself outside of them either.
What abides in the exhibited works is more than materialization and psychological unveiling. Atemporally, rhizomatically, through identity centring, Aleksandra Kovačević presents us with her understanding of contemporary artistic practice as such. Therefore, her voice in painting continues to enlighten and encourage; unending, as a sun of its own.
Dunja Ožegović
Translated by Valentina Rapajić
1 Alen Bešić, The Naked Heart, Zagreb 2021, pp 23-24. (Alen Bešić, Golo srce (Zagreb: SKUD „Ivan Goran Kovačić”, Sveučilišna tiskara, 2021), str. 23 i 24.)
2 Ibid., p 32.