The exhibition “Frequency of Emotional Spaces” is the next logical stop on the artistic road of Đurđa Sivački, certainly inseparable and difficult to define without a short review of her previous exhibition in November 2022, in the School of Fine Arts (FLU) Gallery, entitled “The studio as an oneiric space of the being, relation between figural and abstract artistic expression, exhibition of drawings and paintings”. The extended title of the exhibition, and subject of the PhD thesis, is an umbrella expression and essential characterization of the works and ideas, which we were able to see in a wide span from small chamber to large format paintings. From the internal world we create the material world which, in return, interactively stimulates our emotional, creative nature to give birth to new contents. In the case of this artist, she gives the studio a chance, as both a material and a meditative point, to give a new contribution to her artistic expression. The studio is not a mere material location, office space; it is a spatial aura equally dominated by spontaneity, passion, decisiveness and emotion. This wakes up the power of space, emphasizes the energy it emanates, creates an entity with a significant role in perceiving the entire studio-artist-painting-audience-studio relations.
Chosen furniture, accessories, frames and the entire environment are made based on a real, existing studio, very important to the artist, intimate, significant, which emotionally defines her, just as she defines it. As such, it is predestined to provoke a certain mood, reaction. A space is an internal and visual ambiance, woven of all emotional experiences and events we store with our very existence in it. The result we get finely describes how much and how gentle or negligent we are towards our needs and satisfying them, in our living and working ambiance. We can perceive the paintings as boxes-houses-toys, where the artist allows her childlike, sincere, unspoiled creative potential make a parallel and connect to the warmth of home, nostalgia and snugness, the present settling in her studio, where she finds security and feedback in energy. With its perspective and linearity center in a single point, the painting pulls us into its depths both emotionally and visually, to the behind of everything we see, to the curiosity to involve ourselves even more, to discover, to feel. Because we are warm and comfortable enough to continue the game.
Through constructing a space pleasing for us, we imagine and from imagination create potentially appropriate and convenient spaces for ourselves. From knowing ourselves or at least the constellations in which we feel comfortable and cozy, we physically create our environment, which we know will be effective for us. From our psychological and emotional, internal spiritual corpus, we create and then realize material and physical orbits within which we undisturbedly move. This is the thought upon which Đurđa relates this exhibition to the previous one. She also exhibits a certain number of small formats from the previous exhibition, which make a reference to the new works.
Đurđa now visibly abstracts spaces. The reduced geometry leaves some more traces, so that we could be certain that we are still in that locality, but visibly erases and camouflages strict destinations, leaving us wandering and searching for questions and answers in the beyond-reality, oneiric, levitating. She transfers the point of gravity to color, to the sound and echo of color which certainly origins from her being as an artist, as a woman, as a friend, as a person who feels, contemplates. She does not invent, she imagines on canvases all those spatial relations and connections, which become colored places to her and magnetic places to the observer. So we wish to feel or hear the color, what it has to tell us about the artist and her dilemmas. Đurđa talks to herself, to us, using artistic elements very scarcely, only at the very end. Previously and first, the communication is in the layers of color, which overlap and which she paints over. The more layers of paint, the more layers of emotions and sensations in one day, mutually wiped out, and each shade of color preserves individual sparkles from the multicolored specter. The multiple meanings of colors allowed Đurđa to start from duality as an idea in the artistic, emotional, partnership, own, from duality as a conflict, which can achieve accord and harmony.
“The analysis of colors in the paintings of Ljubica Sokić is established as a kind of key for accepting her messages, and the way of applying paint becomes equally important as the color itself. Thus, finally, in the ethereal and radiated atmosphere of her paintings, which are seemingly so simple, one can gradually and repeatedly discover valuable emotional contents.” (Aleksa Čelebonović, Ljubica Sokić)
The color palette sailed from dim, solid, earth, midtones, and expressed itself in colors very intensive, pure, charged. Still, even besides that vibrating moment and echoing impression about the female principle, pink, purple, red colors, also standing solidly and firmly on her canvases are the blue and navy blue, purple, strong and masculine, yet free. Thus, the coloring managed to tell a story about the polarity of anima and animus which can reconcile and harmonize, undisturbedly function as warm-cold, in the relations of colors and people.
Regardless of whether they are internal or external, the spaces in which people live are basic or complex, because they are essentially relations which determine us, they have their colors, we hear their sounds. They are constantly telling something and have something to tell. Rooms do not need figures/figuration, just like Rothko’s niches do not need them, because the fantastic skill of building and designing these spaces paints the portrait of their creator or resident – which is one person and all others in it, where etherealness and contemplativeness are flowing.
The artist offers her intimate circles to clarify both to us and herself her internal world and its stimulative mechanisms. She introduces us to her home of emotions, sensations, sensitivity, to make it easier for us to experience her spaces as ours, to feel welcome. If abstraction is painting in the service of painting, visual arts and artistic potentials, then this painting is intimate, does not request figure to refresh and refine it, to tell the story of a figure, but only what is suppressed or squeezed out of it.
After carefully underpainting and painting the picture, Đurđa applies the transparent final layer by dotting. After dancing layers of paint and thoughtful forms, she approaches a repetitive act which gives herself calmness, resolution, discovery, and gives the painting dynamics and rhythm. Through shading her own sentimentality and visual sensuality, through meditative repetitions, painting becomes weaving of spirituality, emotionality and visuality.
Mira Vujović
Art Historian
