DIVNA JELENKOVIC, Belgrade, Yugoslavia
PAINTING AS THE HARMONY OF ARCHEFORM AND CONTINUUM
Divna Jelenkovic had chosen painting, certainly in accordance with her nature, as the destiny for her gradual, rational, never rash and never with sudden leaps and stormy soars shaken development.
Through several cycles, balanced and not burdened with contemporary dilemmas, she developed her own, abstract, analytically complex landscape, discovering the phenomena of internal and musical transposition of light and rhythm through elegant gestures, stressing the hidden geometry in fluid agglomerations, the illusion transforming itself into a convincing and autonomous plastic substance, and the whole of associations and poetical charge.
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Ambitus II oil on canvas 50 x 70 cm (1977) |
Her finishing touches exhibit a particular quality of the gesture, based on a delicate tonal structure, coming close even to the surreal domain, where story and formal provocation concede to the contemplative whole, to the visual refuge with an aesthetic distance defined with exclusively plastic arguments and processes, manifesting themselves in an utterly visual manner and, ultimately, as a non-referential quality, despite the persuasiveness of the compositional and formal factors.
But, more important, in gradual and extremely restrained dirctions of selective classification of possible visions, Divna Jelenkovic had persisted in her painting on studio groupings, without an "opus complex". And only after the first cycle has been exhausted, that new prospect appears along with a discrete transfiguration of things rounded according to intimate belief and conviction. If this looks like repainting one single painting, just from different angles and according to strict formal prerequisites, it is only partially true. This is more true for scarce and, apparently very selective favoring of the phenomenon of light in a picture, acting from the structure of the used elements, like some energy unleashed from a deep background, independent and in a manner aggresive, decomposing itself like a lightning in the total scope.
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Asphaltus oil on canvas 33 x 46 cm (1996) |
Hence, by analogy, small and large, the painting imposes itself as a possible fragment of gesamtkunstwerk, as a focused segment of a vision, somewhat theatrical and submitting to expressiveness that depends on the collective conscience, just as the Wagnerian massive tonal universe is turned towards the timeless synthesis, or, at least, towards the future, suggested on the mighty wings of hope.
But if the painting of Divna Jelenkovic certainly exhibits the evolving factor having all attributes of a methodical, primarily aesthetic progression, synchronous chaining, it is even more important to stress the vertical expansion of all the components into a new quality.
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Cacophony I oil on canvas 65 x 86 (1997) |
This is quite apparent after the series Divna Jelenkovic painted during the nineties on small, cabinet format of quadrate paper, with Kleinian short moves, overlaying the white surfaces, in a most sensual way, with defined strokes. Shortly afterwards, she made a fortunate breakthrough, opening up towards broader realms, almost to the limits of the physical amplitude of the gesture, displaying an undiminished freshness and force, uniting what is at once unrepeatable, extremely hazardous and profoundly felt and contemplated.
In this manner, a possible aleatoric of gesture found its conslusion in crystallisation, in solid tectonics of dense forms, in intensified and delicate colouring, in a glow originating in highlighting the physical characteristics of the transparent, boldly applied paste, in the gamma of intense blue, blue-green, violet and sometimes earth shades.
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Eidetic Image IV oil on canvas 116 x 145 (1996) |
These complex creations with their overt massive and intense impact, do not appear to be an interpretation of the expected, but rather a conception of something completely unanticipated, with a clearly defined structure, submitted inevitably to the rhythms of the nature, but suggesting, hyperbolically, the sum of inner sources that form the exciting expression of a new vision.
Dusan Djokic, painter and critic
Member of the AICA
E-mail: divna@YUbusiness.co.yu
