Cry from a Line on the Palm

An open hand turned toward the sky, photographed as if it were offering bare life and revealing all the secrets of the world. Each crease on the skin of the palm glows in the sun that warms it from above, striving to calm the network of lines written harshly on it, like in a book. In that tangle of thin and thick notches we also recognize our own, which we know to be as unique as ourselves. Djordje Stanojevic’s exhibition titled Inscription, at the Magacin Kraljevica Marka venue, which comprises the conceptual exhibition of paintings on canvas and digital photographs of monumental size, with hands and stylized lines of palms, takes the observer on a journey through the deposited layers of memory, incited by the author’s readiness to bare his own mental space in his work. For Stanojevic a picture is precisely that, his workday, thought, desire… Stanojevic’s work in visual arts stems, as he himself puts it, from a deep existential need.

For him the working process is always and only reconsideration, but that is not enough for art, he stressed: “In that first wave of energy you transpose into matter, you’re practically sublimating the energy of Eros and Thanatos, and if you stopped there it would be just a lovely cry. Only after that release of energy does a picture become a mirror for the sky, on which various symbols are written, along with everything we carry in our subconscious, which wants to come out of us as a precise definition. At that spiritual level of the picture, stylization and symbols appear, and here they are the lines of the palm and the eternal question of whether we can change what has been given to us through generations, or if we can only enrich it and turn it into gold. Our fate and our datum are written in those lines, however, if we cannot change that collective memory, perhaps we can enrich it with a new tone, so that future generations can take a different heritage with them,” Stanojevic explained. The exhibition at Magacin Kraljevica Marka will be open until December 23.

Aleksandra Cuk (Danas, December 12, 2009)