" Some other collage"
With a young painter Jelena Minic regarding the exhibition at Belgrade Cultural Centre
„With a help of nonpainting materials and collage details I bring a painting into a state of a unique field on which the transformation is yet to happen“, Jelena Minic pointed out
It is unusual that her first solo (independent) exhibition, a young artist exhibits in the most elite exhibition space in the city, and that is the case with Jelena Minic and her recent exhibition at an Art Gallery of the Belgrade Cultural Centre.
Jelena Minic graduated and postgraduated at The Faculty of Applied Arts and Design in Belgrade and since 1995 has exhibited at many group exhibitions. At her first solo (independent) exhibition she introduced herself with the paintings of a large format for which, the critic Sreto Bošnjak says that they can not be explained in terms of the classical artistry, historical parallels, or even Postmodern principles. They are based on the techniques of collage to which she has given entirely different meaning from that, collage had in modern art, for example from that meaning of collage surrealists and cubists had.
- With system of collage I only create a base of my painting, then I underpaint the canvas on which some kind of intervention is yet to happen – says Jelena Minic. – In fact, besides the collage details taken from other paintings I use nonpainting materials such as glue, wrinkled paper, sand and similar things and in that way bring the painting into a state of a unique field, into rich and multilayered area ready for its final transformation.
Are these paintings a part of some unique cycle?
- I do not work in cycles because I don’d get bind to a certain thematic basis, a story. Sometimes, of course, out of this magma and controlled chaos appears some strange imaginary figure as a sign of subconsciousness, because my paintings are a kind of mixture of my dreams and reality. They also have something associative, but it is not completely expressed. In that way, I allow the observer to upgrade my „story“ himself. The purpose of the quotes from the art history is always the same, because they have been transformed into new character facts by my interventions. Everything is in the service of the color, so it can be said: my painting achieves its essence in a coloristic harmon.