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Dunja Nedeljkovich

Yugoslavia-Italy

aquilone 45x50 cm oil on canvas

€ 490,00

artist statement about the project: 

  The impulse for my work on anthropomorphous landscapes, which I began during my regular studies, came from a walnut tree. This tree was planted by my grandfather ( Miodrag Miša Nedeljkovic) and I in 1984, between studios 27 and 28 of the Hornverk Building, part of the Petrovaradin fortress in Novi Sad (a fortress now dedicated to artists). At the beginning of the year 2000 an eye appeared on the tree, on the spot where a branch had been pruned by the city gardeners. I only needed to add to this scar a very light touch of white tempera, and the eye came to life. The glance it gave me inspired the whole fable that came to me as time went by.

   That is how landscape, as the subject of my figurative creativity, began to develop and to define itself, starting from 2001. Its essence is based on the representation of a latent human figure modeled into trees. I came upon this idea in my quest to develop an original and personal artistic voice that could be easily recognized everywhere. All artistic creations reflect the artist that produced them, and tell of his desire to speak about the world and about his experiences. In my case, I decided to render my impressions of social relations through the use of landscapes, and to incorporate the human figure into them (though not in its original form, everywhere else dominant), in order to give it a greater depth. That is why I distanced my work from the themes of portrait, of the human figure and, in a way, also from that of the classic landscape itself.

   The allegory in which man and nature form the union of the spiritual and of the secular, constitutes my figurative vision. A feeling of unity of this kind is what enchants me every time I contemplate landscapes. Man and nature are two archetypes, intertwined in a primordial symbiosis. And so it was this primitive image that inspired me the idea that I named ‘Tales of the Landscape’, which I first translated into engravings and subsequently into oil paintings.

   The technical procedure is both the mode and the medium of graphic expression. To express the visual contents of my vision by means of engravings, I first carried out a series of experiments. I achieved my multicolored graphic expression using the principle of the jigsaw puzzle. The basis of my jigsaw puzzles is linoleography, that is to say a linoleum sheet treated in a specific way, as in offset printing. The various pieces are cut at a 45° angle, using a sharp cutter, so that each has its tight fitting place in the puzzle and will not move by mistake during the printing process. Every piece can be coated with a different color, and this allows many colors to be applied. The purpose of this technique is to print all the colors in the same passage through the printing press, making the whole procedure easier and more fun. With this technique, the second passage is the final one. The matrix in this case is a zinc plate, treated with the etching technique. Black lines thus model the colored surfaces, defining the engraving and giving it its final appearance. I sometimes work on the linoleum matrices with a different intaglio technique, lino-engraving, whereby I use sandpaper and sharp cutting knives to create a dynamic surface that looks like it’s covered with threads.

   My engravings show various characters, their emotions, their features, their latent human nature, all represented through allegory. In renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s famous work, ‘La Primavera’, we recognize the allegory of spring as represented by a human figure. In my case it’s the other way round. People are represented as different kinds of trees. Every engraving tells its own story and can be brought back to a single event or a specific character, typical of man, enacted through personification. It is because of this that I chose to call them ‘tales’. As Leonardo Da Vinci said: “Paintings are voiceless songs and songs are blind paintings” – the roles in my case being taken over by ‘engravings’ and ‘tales’.

   By creating a graphic print you stimulate the desire to discover what the content expresses and who it is addressed to. The addressee, of course, is none other than the onlooker- the spectator who is ready to follow the artist through his visualizations and to connect with him on a level that the artist himself determines. The level on which I correspond with another individual, with the spectator, is above all the stimulus that I give him to try and find the landscape of his heart. My –Tales of the Lanscape’, as a form of visual communication, always represent the world as a shared symbiosis, the union of the real world on one side and of the imaginary world on the other.