" Purple landscapes of a dream"
A young painter Jelena Minic (1970) was born in Prijepolje and has been achieving a great success during the past years. On 22nd June her first independent (solo) exhibition was opened in the centre of Belgrade, at which she exhibited ten canvases, of mostly larger format as well as two graphic polyptichs. The Gallery was crowded with visitors at the opening, among which were many visitors from Prijepolje, but also a great deal of people from the artistic world.
Jelena’s paintings are recognizable by its distinctive coloring, in which shades of yellow and purple dominate and also by the combined technique of painting. The visitors of the participants of Mileševa Art Colony could be convinced in her way of coloring last year, at which she was awarded. It is evident that Jelena has this creative sensibility, youthful energy and confidence, that she is able to overcome different things in a painting as well as „to control the chaos“. Her poetics is based on her artistic educational level and on her desire to find the original expression for her sensibility together with her own experience of the modern world, to force rich kaleidoscopic visualty of contemporary media and streets to obey, all kinds of thrown pieces ( scraps ) of our civilization, and that is the reason her paintings are similar to collages ( sand, rags, fishbone, old paper, posters ) and „quotes“ in the spirit of Postmodern, given in a dynamic labyrinth of the painting. „ She wants to identify the idea, perception, emotion, act and artistic matter“, Sreto Bošnjak, an art critic, points out in a foreward of the exhibition Catalog.
At first sight, Jelena’s painting is a deconstruction of the outer and inner world, made on purpose, but, in fact, is a hidden dream ( symbolism of a purple color ) as well as a game, which is a common, curious research of a child and daydream of an artist at the same time. We are able to recognize deserted attributes of a childhood, erotic fantasies, unconscious „guests“, rudimentary cave paintings in a labyrinth of modern streets with posters, advertising, graphites and shopwindows. It is a true humorous promenade of, together, reality and fantasy.
Out from aspiration to paint a landscape of a dream with all the actors, and also the author’s concept of „total painting“, the paintings with many details and different materials have been created. All these demand a large format of a painting and certain artistic narration, which, in Jelena’s paintings, gets a form of some informal „comic strip„ in which some faces are appearing, drawings of a nude, an eye, too, and all of these have some psychological – symbolical but a program meaning as well. The color in her paintings is, however, the essence of her artistic expression.