We are accustomed to see young artists, anxious to introduce themselves in the best possible way for their first public display, submitting everything they know and have produced up to that moment, and consequently, turning the exhibition into some sort of inventory of ideas; artist then leaves it over to beholders to decide upon the works they consider superior, and to form their notion on the author on that basis. Danijel Jaman operates in a different manner: a mature one. Those who are thoroughly familiar with this artist's body of work, those who have seen paintings executed, but here unexhibited, know that the artistic conception presented is not the only one that occupies him, but a selection of what the artist himself wanted to show, giving us a completed and utterly confined whole in terms of style.
The idea of possibility to use geometrical stylization to render both the actual reality and its completely abstract derivation is carried otu consistently from the beginning to the end, confining the entire exhibition into a cycle; its homogeneity, more or less apparently, runs through the content, form and colour. As everything else in these paintings, the content also has its continuity which ranges from the objective one; the more simplified it is, the more unrecognizable it is, so that the expression, the medium itself, ends up suddenly being promoted to content. Thus, the second part of the exhibition, the one, is derived from paintings by means of extracting geometrical details from them and, by magnification, promoting them to an exclusive artistic reality. And it is self - sufficient, whithout any need to correspond to the motif, a cause of these Jaman's works.
Abandoning pursuit of objectivity, he therefore accepted the form as his particular reality, as his content.Form in these works in front of you is the one that evolves slowly and very gradually, but the result of that alternations is closer to its start, its beginning, than the content is: its final outcome seems to have forgotten its point of origin.In the initial works we find relatively a lot of geometry, which even increases the more we grow apart from our inclination to indentify the actual subject matter; and that very geometry alone will bring this cycle to a conclusion.
Stylization of the early works allows recognition of the motif, but those mimetic references (boats and sails), although unrestrained, are still geometrical in shape. That boats and sails will sputter with colour and raised rhythms of tightened shapes. A shape iritates the shape next to it, and they are both agitated by their daring, exerted position. Fortunately, this dispute is toned down by a number of round shapes and the softness of the hand conduct. Once liberated from the commitments imposed by objectivity, he will resort to composition solely. It is his participant and arbiter. Everything, even life of the form itself, depends on five variations of the composition.
Composing idiom of his pictures evolves 1) primarily and most frequently around diagonal, especially the one that links the upper right and the lower left angle on its descent, eliminating the commotion scattered among the boats from the previous paintings by means of shape and its position. Rhythms are calm and the harmony would be abvious if there was some tolerance between black and red, but they are in constant rivalry. Such stillness isn't destined to last, because in the very next three paintings 2) disturbance is drawn in again, by moving the diagonal to the left. Domination of red. In the following works that slope will be replaced by a forked wedge, which 3) breaks the balance and binarity of the composition. Nevertheless, Jaman won't stand that much commotion so, anxious to put the situation in order, he will 4) rearrange the vertical orientation of the composition into a horizontal one. Not even that for long, because 5) red will fill the entire painting, covering even a weak opposition on its bottom. Becoming fullness.
Finally, all of this, we musn't forget, happens always in the context of a flat surface, a plane. Lenght, width and shape form his exclusive artistic inventory. And he is skilful enough to compose a firm and abundant visualization. In terms of colour, these paintings are arranged most often on the ground of a conflict, but sometimes even a peaceful joining of red and black. These two are Jaman's distinctive colours. All the others come from a different concept, and take their place in Jaman's palette as such. For, the way they are, and they are often arbitrary and left unrefined, they draw him into an experiment with texture, used to roughen the rhapsodic mildness of black and red. Concise impressions on this exhibition suggest that the art of Danijel Jaman arose from the Apollo's nest, a world of order and measure, captured by him in a constructive manner, by building, without concealing, the structure of his paintings on the base of a geometrical skeleton which enables a finely balanced composition. Emotionality is within the scope of colour, torn between harmony and tension. Andro Filipiæ |
