Belgrade, 20. Feb - 9. Mar 2008




Sign and presence

Extraordinary knowledge of materials, a delicate approach and, above all, awareness of the fact that a work of art is a spiritualized matter, link the latest works of Tatjana Vondracek to the ones presented at her previous solo exhibitions. Naturally, her latest works are refined further with layers that have been merely announced in some previous works or they haven’t even existed: the human face appears (and repeats in different forms and materials); paper bands impregnated with paraffin make a delicate aura of some works, and a written text – something that is a drawing and a bearer of one more plan of contents at the same time – appears as the third important element on those bands. The selected texts are connected by a criterion of final subjectivity: they depict Kavafis’ span, through a hexagram of “The book of Changes”, emotional moments of traditional fairy tales, to fragments taken from the Holly Bible. But regardless of the contents, that lettrisam appears in another function here: a letter is something that reveals certain contents to its connoisseurs and language experts; but it is a kind of hidden meaning to those who do not belong to the aforementioned group, a secret and - very often – magic. In the objects of Tatjana Vondracek, that handwriting, that form of expressive gesture which is opposite to a meticulously developed surface, represents an aura, something that unites features of legibility and illegibility and, above all, something that is a unique personal mark, i.e. signature.

Even at the level of spoken language, the concept of “head” is a signifier of the entire human being. In that sense, the faces on the sculptures – high relieves of Tatjana Vondracek are not portraits. They are signs of presence. The relation between the head and the wall provokes different associations: in ancient Gaulish temple, the head was built into the door-post, as the focus of strength and as protection at the place where one is exposed to some negative forces. The high relief of the human faces which seems to peek from a sketched niche may remind us of a decorative console in mediaeval Romanesque constructions, but it is more likely reminiscence of an ancient belief that no building could exist without human life energy, a belief that has been preserved in a Serbian epic poem about the construction of Skadar.

Voluminous objects wrapped up with bands and texts make us think of yet another ancient civilization – Egyptian civilization. Ancient Egyptians wrapped their deceased with a cloth which was usually covered with messages, hoping to see mummies turn into grubs of another life, the eternal one. If we go further to the south and a bit further in time, we shall encounter special icons wrapped in the cloth and kept in the treasuries in the Christian Ethiopia: people could see these holy objects only when a priest removed the cloth during the ritual. That ritual “opening”, which took place just once a year, shows fear of confrontating the sacred. And it seems that the semi-transparent layers, covering the high relieves of Tatjana Vondracek like the skin, provoke the same awe.

The wall sculptures and objects of Tatjana Vondracek resemble rituals objects of a cult in a certain way, as it often happens in an excellent work of art. At the same time, they are present here, in the room where we are standing in, as well as in some other rooms far away from here.

The contemplation of Tatjana Vondracek’s sculptures could bring in a larger issue – the one about sculpture status and generally about the art at the begging of the 3rd millennium. There are two different groups on the large map of approaches, languages, media and contexts: one group comments the world we live in very freely, from a political, civilization and critical point of view, exploiting potentials of new technologies and media. On the other side, there is an entire circle, which is also divergent. This circle intentionally returns to the hand and its potentials, intimate ambient and those eternal questions all the artists have been asking themselves and the people around them for ages now. The works of Tatjana Vondracek belongs to the group – they have been created to be timeless. They try to convince us that extra temporal dimension is a part of our time, and absolutely contemporary in such a way.

Mileta Prodanovic, text in catalogue

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BELGRADE CULTURAL CENTRE
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