|
An excerpt from the text How the rabbit found dinner
Dinner for Rabbit consists of seven large-format paintings. Džafo often bases the formal concept of his exhibitions on number symbolism. Numbers prevail the disorder, they are a road from disorder to order and, referring to something already known, embedded in the history of culture, they provide the first foothold for reading paintings. Thus, paintings in the Lepus in Fabula cycle followed Christ at fourteen stations along Via Dolorosa and Golgotha. From the excessive symbolic capital of the number seven, the author here refers to those most visible in our culture: the seven deadly sins, the seven-day working week of the creation of the world or an artwork, or to the seventh day of rest - (re)capitulation.
The pictures are narrative. The quotes are taken from the history of painting, mythical scenes, reflexive debris, images of memories copied from personal experience adapt, mutually deconstruct and reinterpret. And on each one, there are rabbits, as a background on which events take place. The rabbit is a multidecade follower of the creative work of Nikola Džafo. Since it found itself in a cage at the kaleyard of the exhibition Art Garden, it has been through a lot. It has been at artistic actions, performances, ran for mayor, reached Golgotha, and even got institutionalized. As an observer, a witness, an accomplice, but always as a carrier of a verfremdungseffekt that destabilizes social and artistic canons: like the one that opens another perspective. And in the pictures from the cycle Dinner for Rabbit its role did not change whatsoever. But it is now a self-conscious, sometimes tired, sometimes angry rabbit. It looks through different eyes, but from the inside. And here first comes something new: "Where the object usually appears, now appears the subject that has the ability to look and respond to looks" (P. Sloterdijk). And to ask questions.
Silvia Dražić
|
|
NIKOLA DŽAFO (1950, Novi Sad)
Graduated and earned his master’s degree in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade. Member of the Association of Artists of Serbia and Vojvodina. From 1990, he became inactive in painting and was most active in the struggle for social values ??and artistic dignity. Ideal creator and initiator of LED ART group (1993), with whom he has created and realized more than thirty projects. Co-founder of the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade (1995) and Multimedia Center "Led Art" in Novi Sad (2000). That same year, in the cellar in Grčkoškolska Street 5, he started Art Klinika, with the utopian idea that art can change and cure the world. In 2013, after the euthanasia of Art Klinika, in the new workspace, he participated in the formation of Šok Zadruga, which tried to stand on its feet and function on the same ethical principles as previous artistic associations. Since 2013, he has been active again in painting, drawing, sculpting, the crafts which he studied. For his exhibition "Lepus in fabula" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, he received Politika Award in 2012.
Contact:
<<< PREVIOUS
|
