21/11/2020
Critique of the ART historian Asja Ismailovski (Vienna / BiH) for Current Exhibition/ SALE 100%
On this Friday the 13th, a date of eccentric significance, opens the solo exhibition of the Sarajevo based artist, Saša Peševski (b. 1986 in Sarajevo). In the space of the Brodac Gallery the exhibition entitled SALE 100% will be on view throughout the whole of November 13, 2020, from 12 p.m. until 10 p.m. These – for the exhibition openings – rather unusually long hours are in effect due to the Covid-19 precautionary measures that on the one hand serve the taking care of the well-being of the visitors, and on the other, direct and inform the dynamic of the viewing experience and movements within the exhibition space. The policy of the gallery and the curator is to let in only four people per viewing. As much as our bodies are already to a certain extent suffocated by the Covid-19 navigation system, we should be also simply happy that in these times of uncertainties exhibition openings are taking place at all. In that sense, this almost ritual, or better said, ceremonial entering in the exhibition space brings about a new perspective within the vernissage system, where more of the viewers’ attention can be focused on the art itself – in this case, Peševski’s twenty-five paintings (acryls on canvas produced in the course of the last ten years), his whimsical narratives and kooky subjects – than on the social pressures of mingling and networking. In the gallery throughout the exhibition day, the curator, Nardina Zubanović, and Peševski himself will be present, being ready to interact with the public, explore the paintings, and create in situ drawings.
The corpus of the exhibition entails, as briefly mentioned above, around thirty-five acrylic paintings on canvas in different sizes (ranging from 20x20, 80x60 to 100x70) cm in both horizontal and vertical proportions. The artworks can be regarded independently but also as an ensemble. Neither abstraction nor figuration prevails in the entirety of the exhibition. Peševski successfully marries the abstract and figurative planes in dark and bright colors and sets his figures upon the monochromatic backgrounds. In the context of the latter, throughout the exhibition, colorful backgrounds prevail. But, before we dive further into the subjects of Peševski's paintings, I will mention a few connotations surrounding the exhibition title, simultaneously alluding to the importance of the artwork titles, as well as contextualize Peševski's art practice within a broader artistic context.
The title of the exhibition, Sale 100%, already refers to the playfulness of Peševski's artistic personality and the embeddedness of English language in Bosnian-Herzegovinian everyday culture. The word "sale" stands in English for "a selling of goods at bargain prices" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sale) and can be rather often seen promoted in the window shops around us. This exhibition courageously and openly uses this commercial slogan and does not shy away from selling. It says loud and clear that its aim (as it is the purpose of every other gallery exhibition) to sell. However, in the frameworks of rather slow turning art marketing machine in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the region, the exhibition title can be simultaneously regarded as an ironic comment on the oxymoronic status of art market within the Balkan's capitalism. At the same time, Sale also refers to the popular nickname of the personal name Saša, i.e. artist’s name. Thus, Sale 100%, indicates that within this exhibition we can see and experience the artist and his practice in its totality - he presents himself, his inner thoughts and imageries honestly and openly to the public exploration. Peševski is present, 100 % - says the title.
Concurrently, the viewer should be aware of the significance of the artworks' titles, which explain and hint at the ongoings of the depicted subjects. They are whimsical, entertaining, and informative notions that carry a timely social critique and artist's individual and emotional states and observations of the world and specific situations around us. But they do not determine the trajectory of the viewer's personal and unique interpretation. For example, one title that I find rather amusingly clever is An inner being on planet earth has slipped on a pineapple - Unutrašnje biće na planeti zemlji se okliznulo na ananas. Its oxymoronic nature and the mere possibility and absurdity that the inner being is capable of slipping on a pineapple denotes the essence of this exhibition and Peševski's painterly world where everything and anything becomes possible.
The latter can be connected by the semantics of Peševski's visual elements with the art practice of Rikardo Druškić and the work of the Art Collective Kreaktiva, with whom Peševski used to collaborate, either in the medium of drawing, graffiti, or performance. This instance is important to mention because the exhibition's curator, Nardina Zubanović, is an artist herself and a founder of the Kreaktiva Collective. Embodying a curatorial role, Zubanović underlined the global exceeding shift from the artistic to the curatorial roles. The role-shifting and disrupting and blurring of the inscribed institutional roles and rules do not end here. Knowing that Peševski is a graffiti artist and vocationally a film director (currently working as an assistant and lecturer of the course of the Montage, at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo) we ought to consider this exhibition as a role disrupting mechanism within the context of the established and prevailing art system.
It was delightfully troublesome for me to begin writing this exhibition text. I have been looking at digital images of Peševski’s artworks for almost seven days now and I feel immensely immersed in his world. And I could stay there (or here?!), hopping from one colorful figure’s head to another; driving alongside a pink rabbit in his tiny cabriolet; rummage through the open head of imagination of the jazz or piano player; climb onto the little machine-like structures attached to hands and heads of the seriously playful Peševski’s protagonists, or simply swing on bull's horns with the landscape of horns and bags underneath me, and skeleton chess players, and pink animal music band, butterflies and phantasmic creatures, portraits with enormous eyes, red nose, chairs and stairs, and instruments and bottles with boats and tiny worlds inside them.
All of these visual instances are inconceivable juxtapositions of things, objects, and living beings from everyday life that on Peševski's canvases found themselves in non-quotidian situations, live their poetic and prosaic pictorial lives. It seems like everything and anything is possible in Peševski's idiosyncratic universe of peculiar relations. What does it mean when a little pink rabbit drives a tiny car in the left bottom corner of one painting, and a small house of simple proportions cries on its one window-like eye, in the corner of another?!
I see little ants working in and around my head (like those in Peševski’s painting Autoportrait/Waiting for the Idea - Autoportret/Čekanje ideje), setting the groundworks for inspiration, at times they are working hard and at times they are letting me explore Peševski’s pictorial screenplays. Not to insinuate, but it is the same captivation a viewer will fall into once in the space of the Brodac Gallery.
The little yellow house with red roof is crying over the crossing of the body from the mortal to the immortal world. In this painting, titled RIP Gojzer, Peševski ingenuously depicts the dead body showing it in its naked anatomy with visible blood vessels. This artwork is an ode, a memento, to the artist's deceased friend and is mesmerizing in its childish simplicity and naivete combined with mature lines and thoughtful narrative. It is precisely in the telling of the story through the juxtaposition of various visual elements where the magic of Peševski's artistic skill resides. His depictions are like screenplays with endless narratives that start in the middle of the one painting and end in the pink rabbit's car of the other - while simultaneously beginning and ending all over again. Peševski's stories end, only to commence again.
In Sale 100% Saša Peševski created an idiosyncratic world of dichotomies, such as street art - studio (salon, gallery) art, academic - amateur artistic roles, inner - outer worlds, mundane - exceptional, and imagination - reality.
From Peševski's iconography of people, animals, plants, animate and inanimate objects, and their phantasmic interconnections, we can also read a social commentary. A depiction of a social psychosis, a collective madness where - and here I am again with the beloved rabbit - pink rabbits drive cabriolets. Saša Peševski also marvelously plays with the layered representations of streams of consciousness and hints at how it works - we are supported by the little (and big) machines and are people-machines ourselves. At the same time, there is the allure of the ruin, of the abandoned, of the broken up and left out that is born in Peševski's artworks. His paintings are little mementos to the topics and emotions no one talks about and things no one cares about anymore. Objects that we leave to die in the corners of our living spaces or recklessly throw away.
It is with the allure of the conflict of chaos and harmony and the poetic representations of mundane, almost invisible things, elements, creatures, and situations of the everyday (un)ordinary life that Saša Peševski lures us in his imagery and captivates us.
