A symphony in purple - Ljiljana Zeković

Works by Gordana Kuč presented in the Dado Atélier in Cetinje

A symphony in purple

With modern sensibilities, poetic emanation and a clear ideological attitude, the artist defines pictorial and physical spaces with a free-flowing play of various shapes and materials, animating our emotional and sensory sensations through them.

Gordana Kuč’s artistic oeuvre represents a unique corpus of ideas in which each idea finds its logical creative path in the previous one. “We are all on a ship, my ship is sailing – life goes on,” says the artist, who plunges deep into her inner self and the secret overtones of the world around her, looking for and finding new inspiring spaces on her endless “journeys”.

Namely, the need to always strive for a certain goal, the final source of its thought stimuli, has formed a work in which the artist has articulated her creative credo through pluralistic means of expression, of the combination, permeation and touching of materials of different textures, structures, and of organic and inorganic origin. With exalted, modern sensibilities, poetic emanation and a clear ideological attitude, she defines pictorial and physical spaces with a free-flowing play of various shapes and materials, animating our emotional and sensory sensations through them. Infinite–finite, introverted–extroverted, energetic–tactile, transparent–hermetically sealed, archetypal–contemporary, examining the primary values of materials and experimenting with them, are vital attributes of her work.

Gordana’s inclination towards “adventure” and her constant search for new expressive references imposes on us the attitude that we should observe and analyse her works as independent artistic and aesthetic creations, as well as part of a whole that synthesises the psychograms of her micro- and macro-cosmic universe.

Let us recall the cycle of paintings and collages – Small Stories, Intervals, Conversations, Focuses; and the environments and installations – Travel Records, Path I, and Diaries for Insight, which, each in its own way, reveal an artist of special sensibility, whose subtle layering can be found in the calligraphic sophistication of intimate female writing.

At the Dado Atélier, Gordana Kuč presents the project “The Time is Now”, which exists as a whole unit in the entire exhibition space.

Time, as a mental, temporal and extrasensory dimension, appears in Gordana’s work as a thin thread that connects her world of intimacy with the divine–infinite and human–finite simulacrum. In the memory records by which she defines her own inner world – her emotional and sensory sensations – time represents the primary ideological category.

The need to penetrate into the essence of the virtual and conceptual meaning of time, which the artist can express only with visual sensations, imposed on her the idea that her own space – the dimension of her own life – is based on coded symbolic and semantic values.

Starting from the axiom that time is inseparable from space, she conceived the gallery space as the bearer of the idea to connect human time – the negation of the eternal – with the divine–heavenly–cosmic time – the absolutely eternal.

The walls and paintings/objects, that represent a unique art corpus, shape a subtle and magical “symphony in purple”. Through purple, a colour that strikes a balance between heaven and earth, the senses and the spirit, Gordana contemplates the human yearning for eternity.

The walls – a celestial area painted with monochrome dark purple, of the same tonal intensity, drag us into cosmic nothingness, which the human mind cannot reach and where the unconscious is born.

Objects/paintings are placed on a background – a metaphor of the earthly physicus, and arranged in space as compositional wholes. They feature an element of the spiral that Gordana previously used in the work Travel Records, presented at the Cetinje Biennale in 1997, where the spirals are filled with internal expressive charges as abstract, stylised, non-iconic modulations, the synchronised rhythmic nature of musical notation, and the arabesque, which opens and closes, covers and reveals the intricate pathways of our subconscious, “interpreting” the secret messages of her intimate world. In the exhibition “The Time is Now”, taking the spiral as the basic motif, she starts from the idea that eternity is not so much in immobility as in a vortex, in the intensity of her artistic creation. Namely, Gordana defines the spiral that symbolises time in cyclic motion with different shape forms: a circle, a rotated circle, an intricate Gordian knot and rhythmic cadences that create an endless play of forms and interspaces.

The colour purple, the spiral, the painting/object and the background/wall as paradigms of the eternal–constant–finite–infinite represent free-flowing structural elements that allow the artist to express her idea of the inseparability of universal categories of time and space.

Entering the gallery, whose space the artist has designed as a unique compositional whole, the visitor seems to be projected into a time vacuum, in the meantime, where it now erases the boundaries between past and future, finite and infinite.

Gordana Kuč, one of the most talented and original artists of contemporary Montenegrin fine art, seems from this exhibition to be telling us the lines of haiku: “With perfect pleasure / I follow my karma / wherever it may go.”

Ljiljana Zeković