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SUMMARY

Art critic Božidar Jelenić reviews Vasko Lipovac’s exhibition at the Split Gallery of Fine Arts. The article emphasizes the discipline of Lipovac’s formal language, its relation to Surrealist procedures and peinture naïf, and the creation of metaphysical spaces through colour, light, and geometrically deformed figures. Jelenić also examines the iconographic and material associations of the exhibited paintings and objects, comparing them with church icons, and considers Lipovac’s position in relation to the contemporary artistic demands of the period.

Dating note: The scan indicates only the year 1966 and the notation “I mjesec” (“first month”). The technical date 1966-01-01 is therefore used solely for chronological ordering; the precise day of publication is not visible in the source.

INTEGRAL TEXT

ICONIC WORLD

Vasko Lipovac Exhibition at the Split Gallery of Fine Arts
Author: Božidar Jelenić
Source: Slobodna Dalmacija, January 1966 (the exact date is not visible on the scan)

The mastery with which Vasko Lipovac constructs iconic paintings and objects is, in its formal basis, guided by an evident culture of taste and an insistence on legibility of expression. This is apparent not only in the arrangements and the finished execution of the objects, but also in the assured command of those elements that make a style autonomous. Here, these are all the regular features of Surrealism and so-called peinture naïf: forms shaped through gentle tonal gradations, in which values are not the result of colour relations alone, but arise through the surreal action of form and light. In this way, particular spaces are created in which dark ochres or bright greens fade or smoulder, evoking a metaphysical silence, stillness, and immobility that is sometimes interrupted by cries of red. Within them live strange beings — dolls, naively and geometrically deformed, at once beautiful and grotesque, tragic and comic. It should also be said that these scenes are displayed in the clear, limestone-white space of the Split Gallery, and that this arrangement appropriately completes the purity of their outward composition.

A series of important questions, however, arises concerning the meanings borne and affirmed by this visible aspect. First of all, there is an evident desire for the exhibition pieces to function, in a certain way, as counterparts to church icons and related objects; yet their pristine condition and only occasional simulated wear give these works a rather indeterminate artistic context. This understanding of material is not entirely aligned with the intentions that run through the physical appearance of the objects. The memory of a life, a symbol, or a concrete remnant of life that denotes the embodiment of truth and beauty in all old and “authentic things” is absent here. Everything is new, and precisely for this reason the viewer is exposed to the double and intersecting operation of the allusive powers of such works. On the one hand, there is a recollection of religious depictions in simplified Renaissance spaces, arranged with artificial flowers or wax and carrying the mentality of some obscure, biblically solemn suffering of the past; on the other is a “contemporary expression,” or rather the desire to modernize that mode of understanding. It is undoubtedly quite likely that contemporary icons are conceivable and realizable only in the manner of Burri or Rauschenberg.

It may nevertheless be observed that, although V. Lipovac has shown several more or less original achievements, such as The Spinster or Yellow Necklace, today, in an age of great syntheses and the almost frontal advance of the visual arts into life, this approach to art is exposed to the dangers of its own mentality and artisanal technique. This compels it to remain within intimate bourgeois interiors, without sufficient power to engage with and become part of the spiritual and material life of society.

Transcription note: this text was transcribed from a single-page scanned clipping. Spelling and typographic ambiguities were resolved only where readable in the source; the original is available for download as a PDF.