U galeriji kulturnog centra Treninje, 09.oktobra 2020. otvorena je samostalna izložba “Sezonarijum”, digitalne umetnice Vesne Opavski. Izložbu je, pored ostalih, otvorila Biljana Jotić, istoričarka umetnosti i nezavisna kustoskinja, koja je i napisala kataloški tekst.
Sledi…
In order to enter in the world of Seasonal, exhibitions of associative notes of time related to the relationship between living nature and man, with seasons of leafing, collecting medicinal herbs, camping or trends … we should first look at the various professional orientations of the artist, and then go into the artistic side of her personality. Biographically, Vesna Opavsky (1976), from Belgrade, of Slovak origin, is a digital artist, consultant and lecturer in the field of internet communication, internet presentation and internet optimization. Also a certified trainer of the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS). She graduated art at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she received her PhD from the Graphic Department on the topic “Keyword-art”. From the above, in every sense of the creative aspect of life, one can follow the formation of its recognizable artistic expression.
Are we closer to the truth in contact with nature or in contact with art? It is perhaps a question that lies behind what we see and from which it emerges visibly, and at the same time a message that initiates a new field of research into the relationship between the exterior and the interior. On the one hand, the weather seasons are the ones that dictate the pace of being outside, outside and vice versa. On the other hand, there is the question of the psychological and sociological level of consciousness of the individual and the collective, what is what is seen from the outside, and what is within a person. The very fact that someone exhibits his works and presents them to the observer is the opening of the inner sphere to the outer, it is just a question of how this division happens. In Vesna’s case, it is a question of a relationship with distance, which imposes on her art the contest of the modern notion of alienation.
Namely, collecting parts of nature directly from it, from the outside, Vesna transfers them to her inner space, which she deepens by further closing in the digital field of representation. The act itself clearly speaks of the need for a unique form of communication, which, for her, always comes from the earliest memory of her childhood. It is connected with an anecdote that she likes to tell: … little Vesna at the age of six, while the other children are playing in the kindergarten, is standing silently by the window, staring at a point outside. When asked if everything is all right, six-year-old Vesna Opavsky draws the educator’s attention to a leaf of a tree “that moves beautifully in the wind”. Although I admired the courage and eye for the details of the girl from the story, I always noticed her inadequacy to her environment.
The unique way of communication with oneself closes in a safe sphere a work of art made in modern technology of digital graphics on paper, technical overlaps of semi-transparent layers in which it connects the visible and the invisible, the obvious and the extreme. By recording the phases of his life through digital art cycles, Vesna compares art and life, objective and digital reality, the relationship between nature and man, living nature and technology, tradition and the new. By recording realities, it is something like she is mummifying nature, time and space, thus providing them with duration and impermanence.
Let us recall the aesthetic theory of larpurlartism, according to which art for art’s sake is sufficient, connected with a pure sense of beauty. In the case of Seasonal we could build on and reformulate the setting into art for the sake of nature or, conversely, nature for the sake of art. Because Vesna finds beauty directly in nature. For 15 years, she has been dealing with the issue of plants, living flora and moving it into the artistic world. By giving her new life within the framework of the paper, he connects her with man, on the one hand she protects her from the same, while on the other hand he expects the connection and unification of man and nature. Thus, her art takes on a global ecological context.
Contemporary art, in the age of post-truth, corresponds to post-modernism, when it is characterized by diversity and discourse, with an emphasized attitude towards the examination of values, which is mostly a withdrawal and a question of aesthetics in art. Looking at Vesna’s works as ready-made digital forms, we can ask ourselves what is the moment in which we move from visual enjoyment to a critical field of thought? Namely, with a characteristic dual approach to the creative, it combines these two aesthetic criteria and separates poetics from the mimetic and the representative in art
The recognizable aesthetics of Vesna’s Seasonal corresponds to the paradigm of time and the concept of new forms of communication in art and with property, which imposes itself as another characteristic of the artistic sphere of her inner personality. Thus, nature in its perfection and communication in its need merge in the artistic expression of recognizable aesthetics and techniques of digital graphics of the same dimensions and frames, closed behind glass. From this protected purified field and the security of survival, a sphere of new communication and experience opens up.
Biljana Jotić, art historian and curator