Davor Ljubičić / Palazzo Bembo / PERSONAL STRUCTURES open borders / 57th Venice art Biennale

Davor Ljubičić / Palazzo Bembo / PERSONAL STRUCTURES open borders / in the context of the 57th Venice art Biennale, Mediation through Gallery Bagnato


The composition with the title “Constellation” is part of my new large series of the same name. It is an installation-based presentation, built up of large watercolor paper sheets (280 x 152 cm each), put side by side or on top of each other, along with a monitor on the floor. The hanging elements – drawings or, as I prefer to call them, charcoal works, compete for their places in space. The sheets hanging above and the sheets hanging beneath are connected, and the parts that are covered and thus hidden can be temporarily completed by finding and creating new forms – like on single sheets where the color black tries to hold its ground against the color white and vice versa.
Concentrated forms, appearing to be strangely organic, in a deep carbon black, caught and clustered in a “net” of spiral, long and rounded movements, radiate a distinct physical but also sensuous presence – extensive and almost violent.
On the small monitor, or in a similar video projection, the search for form continues. I draw with my left hand on the right hand and the other way round, and by moving my hands new forms are created. The search for form, for the right form, runs like a thread through my entire oeuvre. I compare this search with an “archaeological excavation”, which means I try to discover and dig up things in my memory, which sometimes become expressively manifest in large watercolor paper sheets, but sometimes can also cover them like a delicate and soft veil, a tender skin. Charcoal skin.
I dig.
I dig deep.
I dig quickly, quicker.
Some of the finds I bury again.
Fragments and shreds.
They appear, they conjoin, they grow and they rub each other out again. New forms come into being in a constant process – familiar but at the same time strange and unmanageable, eluding any precise structure.
Quickly.
I have to quickly capture them on large sheets of paper before they disappear again, before they rub each other out again. Contrasts are colliding, either with a loud bang like a hammer blow on a tabletop and then again quietly, gently – almost harmonically. Calm moments collide with movements full of verve, large with small, dense with transparent, black with white.
But is that really true? Is that how it is? Maybe, but maybe not … and I just imagined the whole concept due to my current perception. In any case … the process continues.
And in Christoph Bauer’s words: “The formal, compensating game with the resources is of no interest to the artist, he rather prefers the venture, the creative act and vital process. Ljubičić is interested in merging his own physical experience with the acquired resources and materials, that turn into cyphers for the own human existence. … If we comprehend Davor Ljubičić‘s work as symbolic forms, we will discover their allegorical value for our own destiny“, and, adding a quote of Henri Bergson: “Each condition in itself is continuous becoming.”