FROM THE CATALOGUE FOR THE EXHIBITION: FROM THE JOURNEY OF AN INDIVIDUAL, ZVONO GALLERY, BELGRADE, 2005
Barbara Vasic’s work is a linking of various pictorial elements that no longer show differences among them, but instead reveals the similarities. The process renders invalid all questions about the “actual” and meaning of things. They are what they become in a cognitive process. This already determines how they are perceived and through this perception how they are changed through the imagination of the viewer. This does not result in arbitrariness; instead individual choice marks the assignment of meaning. The resultant artificial character of that which is seen provides the viewer with the detachment necessary for reflection, and thus makes critical understanding possible.
Noel Kelly, Curator: Temple Bar Gallery & Studios
Barbara Vasic’s work takes the viewer on solitary journeys across architectural spaces imbued with an atmosphere of dark melancholy. The solidity of the architectural structures are full of fissures creating a fragmentary and disjointed experience. The Journes she represents give the illusion of movement toward a final destination but arrival is permanently delayer and the viewere is held in a static and hypnotic embrace.
Kieran Mc Bride, Artist, Dublin
Drawing as a Mode of Transport
At exhibitions of contemporary architecture or set design, our attention is often drawn by a sketch or a croquis representing the initial idea of the author quickly put on paper. These initial sketches will later grow into an architectural building, someone’s home, or into theatre or film sets. Whether they are executed in watercolour, ink, pastel, collage, or through a combination of different techniques, because of their pictorial simplicity and legibility, they can acquire the aesthetic dimension of a painting.
The prints by Barbara Vasic, made in the technique of digital collage, poses the openness and spontaneity of architectural sketches. The sharp, expressive drawing enlivens the documentary photographic parts of the prints. Through dialogue, two seemingly contradictory visual treatments, create a subtle optical play in which the drawing only suggests the transition from interior to exterior.
Barbara’s video works are a result of the animation and harmonious repetition of the prints. Now animated, the drawing acquires a completely different dimension. It becomes the active element, which alternatingly transforms interior space into exterior. By fast alternation of interior into exterior, or an urban environment into a natural one, we get the impression of ceaseless movement. The drawing itself in this way becomes a means of transport for a journey on which our visual and existential experience evolve.
Bogdan Pavlovic, Painter, Paris
Drawing and simulation – two basic means for the representation of space, as we imagine it, as we see it, as we recognise it, through images of reality stored in our memory, Our retinal experience, it seems, is forever intertwined in that mediated remembrance. Thus, the tunnel as a virtual image of movement... or maybe as a metaphor of imprisonment in a spectacle of images that discipline our bodies and our thoughts. What do we see in fact, and is the gaze sharp enough to penetrate the screens of memory? Or, is what we call reality just an exaggerated trompe l’oeil? The subjective, almost existentialist journey through a fragmented memory of reality, space, environment, place, architecture and nature brings the package of animated images by Barbara Vasic. These are not symbolic images, nor images-representations, nor images-simulations. They do not lead us towards conclusions, nor do they satisfy our need to guess the story. Neither do they play with us, despite their shimmering collage dance, but they brutally bring us back to an endless perceptive loop.... like what Georges Didi-Huberman calls contact images.
“Images that touch something and then someone. Images that cut to the quick of a question: touching to see or, on the contrary, touching to no longer see; seeing to no longer touch or, on the contrary, seeing to touch. Images that are too close. Adherent images. Image-obstacles, but obstacles that make things appear. Images coupled to each other, indeed even to the things of which they are the image. Contiguous images, images backing each other. Weighty images. Or very light images that surface and skim, graze us and touch us again. Caressing images. Groping or already palpable images. Images sculpted by developer, modeled by shadow, molded by light, carved by exposure time. Images that catch up with us, that manipulate us, perhaps. Images that can ruffle or chafe us. Images that grasp us. Penetrating, devouring images.
Images that move our hand.”
Jelena Vesic, Freelance Curator, Belgrade