Art critic
Independent exhibitions as a surprise as well as complitely resolved problematical, technical and artistic whole are extremely rare. Besides, they do not appear before us from knowledge, awareness and undertaking as well as from some familiar formula, but from Jelena Minic’s autonomous and, let us say, pretty original way. What is the content of the actual access of this author? In the way of her comprehending and reflection of a painter as well as in genesis of her work through the technical procedure. In fact, it can be said, that these two layers are consolidated in her approach, and they make inseparable whole. The technical procedure itself as well as the used means together with the complete usage of different materials in the function of the complex materialization, express the way of thinking and expressing oneself „per se“; they are not in an intermediary function, but represent the language itself, as J. Dubifet would say with whose principles the writer of the foreward S. Bošnjak rightly finds the connections.
The paintings of Jelena Minic are based on the collage principle in a broader sense. It is not a radical collage in the pure technical and school sense, but autonomous usage of this technique. By combining various technical procedures: oil painting, applying the coloured paste, glue and sand, scraps of rags and wrinckled paper with different and numerous clips of the pictures ( reproductions from the press) incorporated in the whole by sticking – Jelena Minic achieves the thicken and complex „ relief“ structure. A flat surface with a kind of rematerialization, in a complex procedure, leads us from the position of the surface into a state of a deeper stratified structure. The paint is used in underpainting as well as in afterpainting in a previously meant way, by literally painting over the reproduction, partly afterpainting, or by free colouring interventions (transparent spread, rough line contour, framing, etc.) somewhere she leaves intact reproduction, which gives the whole the contrast liveliness as well as rhytmic diversity. By thickening, the accumulation of visual small data, it is not meant to be in a function of previously thought syntactical and semantical messages. Close state of chaos that associates on the Šejkin’s „ The Dump“, it searches its sense in a form – structure which is, by itself, the carrier, and not the transferor, the mediator of the content. Pretty chaotic „ makrokosmos“ of the being, things and signs expresses archetypal overcrowding of the human consciousness by its accumulation and perforation from the layers of enformelistic fog, the consciousness that comes out through layers and deposits of formless fog in striving to find meaning in meaninglessness, order in a mess, traces and sense of a being in nothingness. Would all be lost, would all disappear in that chaos, or would sense be born from the springing abundance? Are the shapes sinking and disappearing in a swallowing fog, or are they emerging, given birth to by it, the artist leaves us to figure out ourselves; all of that is possible to experience as a twoway process – and out of the limited state, the charge is even doubled. The main carrier – ingredient of the energetic charge is swallowing – begetting magma of the colour, the colour as a substance – material in a process as well as the colour as a psychological means of expression, in this case, not exidently warm, heated, violent ( red, yellow, orange ) aggressively explosive.
At first sight, behind a rough form of Jelena Minic’s paintings, it is being releived a designed as well as by proper means achieved artistry. By her rough and wide strokes, layers of the coloured layer over the reproductions, Jelena Minic transforms its precise and clear contours into a shape of the riven character, worn-out, torn, irregular edges. In that way she rebreaks and disintegrates already accumulated chaotic, semanticaly unconnected group. Behind such understood colour, as expansive – disintegrational „ living materials“, covered remains of the shapes are being perceived.
Jelena Minic has achieved, in a typological sense, to create an authentically, figuratively „her own painting“ considerably based on postenformelistic experience and entirely in the spirit of our time