Site Overlay

„STONED SLEEPERS“ solo exhibition by Djerdji Ačai, Lucida Gallery, Belgrade, 2018

Stoned sleeprs, Djerdji Achai / Biljana Jotic

Dreams, thoughts, sensibilities, reality, artistry … all together in the work of young artist Djerdji Acai could begin with the title of her first solo exhibition: The Painting Diary of Disappearance. It was at that moment that her art began to evolve towards the diary of emergence, for in her works she creates new characters that emerge through the shaping of figured forms filled with feelings and trapped in them, isolated and raised above reality, surreal personal forms in which life pulsates in small.

These petrified beings recognize the introvert, that is, the concentration of artistic sensibility enclosed in the form of a being that resides in an indifferent relation to external projections of reality. With a tinge of nostalgia for the time that precedes it, that is, for people as bearers of previous experiences, knowledge, skills, virtues … Djerdji’s art strives for continuity, connecting the sense of being in the present in relation to the past.

The artfully deformed figural forms seem to close the inner purity, defending the feeling of fragility, responding to alienation and striving for the strength of the individual. In this process, we can also observe a moment of unobtrusive engagement in calling for awareness of the crisis of identity, disruption of the value system, or marginalization of true values ​​and their duration. Does association with Quasimondo, a literary bearer of social critique of time,
social circumstances, and prejudice, dismissed because of his physical deformities appear in the shells of art forms?

Building on a preoccupation with the inner being raises the logical question, how do you convey all these questions and feelings in a visual form? Djerdji Acai does this with voluminous shapes, leaning toward geometrization, at times with the dramatic light-shade ratio, the presence of an unobtrusive color palette, with the ultimate outcome of an always balanced overall composition. The specificity of a balanced gesture, the processing of each separate work and the merging into a whole, the two-dimensionality of forms, characterize its mode of artistic expression, poetics. In the subconscious aspiration of leaving the material world for the sake of returning to spirituality in recent works, an increased intensity of definition and expressiveness of figural forms filled with emotion separated from reality, that is, the petrified dream, is noticed.

The distinctive skill of realizing the idea rests with the artistic power of Gjerji Açai, who continues to lead it further, deeper and wider.

Biljana Jotic

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Serbia