The Night Has Fallen on Everything We Have Avoided

Against the Light, Despite the Darkness: Through Claude’s Glass

A conversation between Mia Ćuk and Tomica Radulović on the ocassion of his solo exhibition “The Night Has Fallen on Everything We Have Avoided” at U10 Art Space, April 2025

MĆ:

In the question that follows, in the original typed version of the text, I made one mistake. Instead of the word “painting” I subconsciously wrote “frame” so the newly created question reads: Let’s start with one of your frames that keeps coming back to me as a possible beginning of the scene of our conversation, a conversation in which neither you nor I appear, but in which we are implied by that physical absence as some kind of unreliable narrators. It is a portrait of a man holding a sort of a frame with a small oculus in the middle, a little above the height of his face (similar to when we look at a photographic negative or an X-ray image in natural light), possibly a device for viewing solar eclipses which were common at the beginning of the 20th century. In any case, the man is focused on a certain part of reality that he has isolated with this small instrument, which is beyond our reach. He is framing a certain scene, while we see him only partially, within the format in which you, as the author of the painting, have placed him, but only after you have deprived him (or us as observers) of the possibility of understanding the wider plan. His body does not exist, or is just beginning to exist, outside the boundaries of the painting. It seems to me that this relationship between the boundaries of the body and the frame is very important for navigating your poetics, a relationship about which Deleuze says:

In any case, framing is limiting. However, according to the very concept, boundaries can be conceived twofold — mathematically and dynamically. Sometimes they precede the existence of the body whose essence they separate, and sometimes they go as far as the power of the existing body reaches.

How do you see this relation of borders in your works?

TR:

What interests me is the possibility of framing becoming the way in which the visible and the invisible are refracted through each other. The protagonist of the mentioned painting frames a part of reality that remains beyond our reach. He is both the subject and the object of the framing, but at the same time he is in a kind of existential vacuum—his body is not validated, but is only a hint that opens up space for a dynamic interweaving of the boundaries between the image, the body, and the gaze.

I would follow up on your reading in of the possible object that the protagonist is holding above his face and go even further into the past, recalling the object known as Claude glass, named after the French painter Claude Lorrain. A small, convex, tinted glass used by 18th-century British travellers and artists to view landscapes through. An optical instrument that allowed the artist not a direct view of the landscape, but a mediated, darkened reflection of it—through a kind of pre-photographic lens, the surrounding scene would appear in distilled colour with softened focus, reducing detail and tonality. A man looking into a convex mirror turns his back on the subject he is painting to see it in the dim reflection of the reproduction, thus turning to its darkness.

Through stories about fragmented identities, dark and cryptic worlds, and hallucinatory visions, Claude glass becomes a symbol of illusion, artistic mediation and the impossibility of seeing reality directly. Observing the world through the dark reflection of this glass, we and the reality are summed up in one darkened frame—an image that simultaneously reveals and hides, distances and refracts reality through its own shadow.

MĆ:

Thinking about this frame-body dialectic, the idea of ​​sacrifice somewhat involuntarily comes to my mind as a third concept; sacrificing the totality of the scene (cognition) to the voyeuristic tunnel vision of the close-up frame, the result of which is the fragmentation of meaning. The frame that in your paintings has an extremely corporeal function.

Bataille:

It is mainly a characteristic of sacrifice that it harmonizes life and death, that it gives death the boiling point of life, and life the weight, vertigo and openness of death. It is life mixed with death, but at the same time death is a sign of life in it, an opening towards the limitless.

In one correspondence, you wrote to me that almost all of your scenes have repressive-voyeuristic qualities. In the series on view, we can sense more direct links with Christian themes of sacrifice, e.g. by quoting Caravaggio’s “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”, but in a completely alienated, detached manner. The act of disbelief translated into an iconographic tradition where Thomas’ finger, guided by Christ’s hand, receives permission to explore the spear wound, has always left a strong impression on me of a certain profaneness, which is not devoid of something erotic.

Bataille continues: the field of eroticism is essentially the field of force, the field of violence…

TR:

In one of the paintings, which shows hands leaning against a wall, while a finger penetrates a hole in its surface, Bataille’s transgressive impulse is readable – the moment in which touch becomes the inscription of desire, and the act of crossing the border becomes the central motif.

Referring to the figure of the narrator (voyeur) who entrusts power to the gaze – it is not realized through direct appropriation, but through uncertainty, frustration and deferment, because the gaze always meets its own limit, where the mediated objects of the world become fetishes of everyday life.

Using the methodology of the deferment of the gaze, I derive meanings through deposition as the physical act of the “laid down” or “removed” body (the removal of Christ from the cross) – a process of conditioning that shapes a space in which meaning does not arise through direct representation, but through lack, absence and loss.

Acéphale, Bataille’s vision of the headless man, carries this same structure. Its function is precisely to remain in a state of permanent transgression, representing a direct counterpoint to Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. For Bataille, Masson’s version was not just a representation of death, but an act of liberation – a return to the lower instincts, the unconscious, sexuality and lust. The figure of a man with a burning heart in one hand, a knife in the other and a skull covering his genitals is not just an image of chaos, but a scene in which meaning cannot be anchored – it is constantly shifting and reconstituting itself… Oscillating between sublimation and regression, between death and resurrection, trapped in a space in which only mediation is possible – through language, the stage act, metaphor. Real action is replaced by representation, the gaze becomes the last form of appropriation, while the artistic act is transformed into the only possible one, a space of conflict between what one wants to see and what remains forever hidden.

MĆ:

Reading one interesting analysis of the literary work of J. K. Huysmans the other day, an author who is close to both of us, with a special reference to his landmark novel “Against Nature” (À Rebours), I am again thrown into the territory of our previous correspondence, in which the dominant themes are those of literary characters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the idea of ​​the “new man”, a broken and mechanised individual, lost in the great metropolis, passive but effective, who depicts one ever-rapidly approaching reality. Huysmans’ Des Esseintes may not fully correspond to this typology (and chronologically it certainly precedes it), but it is interesting that this very character marked an important turning point in the history of literature – the transition from naturalism to symbolism. Your paintings are situated on a dreamlike edge between times and styles, it is not easy to attribute them to a “school” or to say they are directly influenced by a “movement”. Their character comes from a place that I find mysterious and barely conspicuous, inseparable from these cultural references and sensibilities of a time that today I discover only in passing traces – among underlined sentences in dusty books, on photographic slides, inserted colour plates of old art history books, in voices coming from an illuminated street window. I could certainly add a few contemporary references to this, but it seems to me that contemporaneity is something that is not of crucial importance for your work, guided by Agamben’s remark that “true contemporaries are those who do not coincide with their own time and do not adapt to its demands”. Like our Des Esseintes. Can you tell me what the notion of contemporaneity means to you, or how do you view some of its demands in the context of your painting?

TR:

I have always liked Agamben’s definition of contemporaneity where he says:

The contemporary is the one who keeps his eyes fixed on his time, not because he could see light in it, but because he recognizes the darkness in it. The contemporary is the one who knows how to see the darkness of his time as something that concerns him and which constantly returns, who glimpses in that darkness the light that, like stars, traveling towards us, dissipates elusively in the past.

I think the pressure of contemporaneity is something we cannot fully resist. Even on the example of Des Esseintes, who buys a house outside of Paris that becomes a physical and metaphorical space for his inner rebellion against society and its values.

Relying on Foucault’s concept of repression, the house does not represent a refuge or an escape, but a space in which a new kind of subjectivity is shaped. Likewise, Des Esseintes’ intimate space is not only a refuge from society, but also a place where he defines himself anew through the ritualized aestheticization of his existence. His rebellion against society is not complete freedom, but a restructuring of norms in a different framework. Paradoxically, his attempt at isolation actually makes him even more defined in relation to the world he rejects. In this light, contemporaneity is not something that can simply be rejected or overcome – it shapes us even in the moments when we think we are resisting it. Any rebellion against contemporaneity becomes part of its own dynamics.

MĆ:

Finally, with a spatial intervention in the gallery, we can say that you tend to reframe the gallery space, usurp the usual logic of observation, but very discreetly, making a certain perceptual confusion (glitch) rather than a true disorientation. That disorientation is already present elsewhere. What role does the space in which you exhibit play, do you actively think about it while you paint, and do you feel that sometimes that space is too broad, as one total plan in a film sense (I am writing this knowing that the space in which you work is extremely small, compressed, as your compositions- cinémes as Pasolini used to call film frames)?

TR:

I think that a painting is not something that is viewed exclusively from a distance, but the space in which the artist is located also within it. Thus, the spatial expansion of the image and its perceptual growth does not remain closed within its dimensions, but visually expands, becoming an experiential space. Conditioned by the space in which I work, making the much-needed distance impossible, working on the painting becomes an almost performative act, bringing me closer to artists like Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, not necessarily in expression, but in physical involvement and the treatment of coloured fields.

The space in which the painting exists cannot be separated from the way in which it is seen, therefore by intervention in the space, the subtle usurpation in the form of a prefabricated wall, I am attempting to turn the gallery space into a kind of proscenium, increasing the theatricality of viewing. To force the viewer to step “on stage” and approach the painting up close.

The visitor is no longer a passive spectator – he becomes a participant, an actor in the space of the painting, invited to take a place, to expose himself, to move around…

Bibliographic sources:

Žil Delez, Pokretne slike, Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića (Novi Sad: Budućnost), Sremski Karlovci, 1998. 

Žorž Bataj, Erotizam, Službeni glasnik, Beograd, 2009.

Ž. K. Uismans, Nasuprot, Prosveta Beograd, 1966.

Đorđo Agamben, Što znači biti suvremen?, Fakultet za medije i komunikacije, Beograd 2019.