ABOUT

A Brief Note on the Painting of Jelena Đurić

/Sava Stepanov/

Painter Jelena Đurić emerged on our art scene during the first half of the new century, after completing her undergraduate studies (2001) and her master’s degree (2005) in the painting department under Professor Milan Blanuša, at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. In Serbian society, this was a time of permanent crisis caused by the still unforgettable events of the fatal nineties and numerous transitional traumas that appeared after 2000. In such social circumstances, the young artist found an adequate painting response. Her early works are of a figurative nature, and the title of the series Greek Figure as a Modern Symbol, as enigmatic and provocative as it may be, precisely describes the artist’s concept and intentions. In Jelena Đurić’s (then Stojković) paintings, antique figures dominate and the artist places them in everyday situations. With these unexpected scenes, the young painter philosophizes about the position of modern man, “homo informaticus,” often mute (like an antique statue) witnesses to global events who sometimes try to isolate themselves from contemporary society that burdens them with numerous woes. Because today’s developed capitalism and global communication system neglect the wholeness of man, his integrity, and needs – insisting only on his timely and efficient execution of work functions. Therefore, Jelena, with a sure expressive gesture and strong color palette, painted paradoxical scenes in which antique figures are often part of the urban milieu, placed against a wall painted with graffiti, faced in a boksing ring, submerged in a pool, “lost” on a shelf with tools,… With her first comprehensive cycle, Jelena Đurić showed the ability to express a critical and engaged stance (figure, scene), permeated with an effective synthesis of reason (line, drawing) and sensibility (color, palette).

At one point, life circumstances “demanded” a different understanding of the image and its meaning from the young painter. This initiated a significant change: dealing with personal sensibility, Jelena Đurić leaves the external and visible reality presented by figurative painting and begins to search for the invisible inner core and essence of her own being. Diving into the abstract painting, she insists on reaching essential pictoriality. Following the pattern of her own personal nature, Jelena Đurić establishes and treats the painting as a living organism. The tissue of this painting is defined by pictorial elements with which the artist achieves action autonomy, and the painting pulsates with the flow of lines, the action of color, the live structure of matter, and surface… All this results in a complex painting in which the most delicate thoughts and feelings are expressed with authentic pictorial elements and means. In the period 2008-2010, in Jelena’s art workshop, a cycle titled “Reaction” was created. This title indeed reveals the artist’s motives. Adhering to the stance “that reaction is defense, necessity, and obligation,” as she published on her website, the artist “defended” herself from all personal worries, troubles, and obsessions. This is indicated by the fact that in these, we would say confessional paintings, color is spread across the entire canvas, from edge to edge, so that with its monochromatic surface (black, red) it forms a pictogram-like appearance of a heart. Here, the role of drawing is extremely important: in these paintings, lines flow in parallel intervals, resembling an electrocardiogram. These linear records diagnose the state and degree of the artist’s excitement, indicate the rhythm of pulsation, and highlight a unique pictorial vitalism (Heart Core, 2008/09), whose metaphorical effect is applicable in everyday social relations and behavior. In a figurative sense, Jelena’s paintings from the “Reaction” cycle diagnose the state of a society in crisis, a society that, in the Solzhenitsyn sense, needs healing.

During the gradual creative maturation, artist Jelena Đurić, in the period after 2010, insisted on the plastic-pictorial solidity and compactness of the painting. She creates her abstract painting, now quite obvious, by the principle of “inner necessity” about which the great Wassily Kandinsky once wrote. This principle is based on the primal need to achieve an authentic discourse of color and other pictorial elements which, synthesized in the painting, lead the observer to inner spiritual values. In a slow process of subtle and discreet changes, the painter gradually calms the exaggerated expressive outbursts and gestures, opting for pure, genuinely experienced and contemplated pictorial situations. The plastic unity of the painting is formed by sedimenting delicate layers, a multitude of linear strokes, and other operational procedures, all the way to achieving the desired intensity of color, the appropriate tone, value, shade… Such a painting pulsates with an interesting linear structure in which the true peculiarity are the artist’s handwritten (in)decipherable inscriptions and drawings. They are difficult to decipher, here they act like fragments of documentary, diary, confessional, poetic statements, and some kind of mysterious testimonies. In the structure of the painting, all these lines of various appearances, characters, and intensities have an important function of reinforcement that supports and strengthens the entire painting, making it coherent. All this makes Jelena Đurić’s painting achievements complex, layered, dense, rich, and very sensitive pictorial creations.

In the third cycle of Jelena Đurić’s paintings titled “Dreamers,” emotion is the dominant basis of the entire communication series artist-work-observer. Everything is based on color and its delicacies. Although in this painting, each colored layer represents a separate piece of information about the artist’s sensibility, although it is a painting all in trembling, which imposes the impression of wonderful fluidity, although her painting is dominated by the impression of elegance and some kind of festive beauty – this painter is not at all sentimental before sublime aesthetic phenomena, but sovereignly maintains the spiritual power and meaning of color as the basic means of her pictorial action and expression. Jelena Đurić’s painting is authentically defined because it is formed by the synthesis of sensitized linear veining, colored bloodstream, pulsation of matter, irreducibility of the pictorial surface. Such a painting reaches the status of a “self-referential structure of autonomous plastic elements” (S. Mijušković). By building an autonomous world of painting and establishing autochthonous plastic harmony, the painter resists the disturbing disharmony of the social environment and existential reality, remaining dignified in all that environment of crisis everyday life.

What is the meaning of Jelena Đurić’s painting/paintings in the actualities of the world and art? Due to the dominance of computer technology and the character of developed capitalism that completely occupies contemporary man and neutralizes his emotions, the character of the painting has changed, encompassed by advanced electronic technology, rapidly transforming towards informational-communicational areas, towards sociological and other scientific examinations and research… Painting has lost its position as the leading visual language in art. Fortunately, authoritative art achievements still possess the strength and power to present us with a relevant projection of reality and to lift us above the level of practicality and utilitarian functions. These paintings, amid daily manifestations of epochal crisis, present us with seductive ideas of harmony, beauty, and contemplation. And it is precisely these ideas that have been so supremely achieved in the paintings of Jelena Đurić.

January 2016. Sava Stepanov