Nikola Šuica
“Which one is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?” (Soren Kierkegaard)
Zoran Tešanović continued to lower the layers of motif figurative decompositions, to deepen the ironic rebuses and the seductive presentation of introduced props. For more than three decades, his art has been a refined legacy on the one hand, of the tradition of an oblique observation of the world, and on the other, a subtle superstructure of general circumstances. Arranged freely and free from gravity, the way of presentation appeared as a recipe for self-constructed social games, such as dominoes or a deck of cards, personifying heraldry similar to fairy-tale characters, and rebus and iconographic knowledge. Tešanović’s artistic act, the persistence of painting, becomes proof of the exploration of a world that has fallen out of regular order. Being in the stripped reality of today within the primarily screen and canceled devalued visualization, the painter is the creator of polyvalent colorings of active perception of his art. Where reality and dreaming sometimes overlap.
The picturesque and stylized adventure of facing contrasts is consistently based on a variety of perceptual evidence. The apotheosis of the painting skill is the justification of the impermanence of the approach, and the multiplied joyous peace of discreet juxtaposition. If one were to imagine moving through its stages as an already built painter’s edifice, through rooms – stanzas, that confessional picturesque organon of beings and sensory entanglements leads one to perceive the seemingly mysterious, but also something experienced along the way exceptionally from the path of discovery. In a series of scenes in such imagined rooms and formats of performed works, the patient rhythm of playing on the ruins of some long-ago idyllically expected ending is evident. As early as the 1990s, Zoran Tešanović devoted himself to following the mythologically organized and sensually encircled territory of figurative representations.
Entered shares and declarations of form are therefore also means for freed and restrained instinctual, psychological, no less ideological and economic entanglements. The handwriting of mirroring, that native sparking power, embodied in the prop of the mirror, turned out to be an outburst or a revolutionary anatomy of the order of relationships themselves.
Paintings from “Beauty and the beast“ cycle, with which he started the exhibition campaign, was outcast into examples that merge the experience of biological order, mixture of human and animal species in vegetation symbols. In those ensembles the key composition rules come down to distancing so pieces are put through “Voltaire’s” irony, leaving figuration front for overruling true evil and distorted systems. The picturesqueness of allegory or pamphlets in blown up lining of plans rolled and colorful figures opens kaleidoscopic queue.
There are in figurative riddle merges forms of schematic animal and human like, as well as geological, anatomies since 2001, wavy or windy stretches of lyricism and dramatic epic modes of unhidden tension and expectation in sole artistic composition of personified participants (Dijana; The Mirror; Pirates’ ways; Almodovar, or, Masquerade ball). Curvy and deceptive current brings a sort of hazardous iconography of unexpected item encounters, which is a surreal invention introduced into ceremonial pendants or previous civilizations orders.
The language of previous illusionism has entered the complete prop legacy of used items. Even when strong physique motif places that used incarnate or dedicated illustrative emphasis of female sensual energy, or harlequin mystique aside, by local colors, we have crossroads of allusive presence and human errands. Composed simply phase transitions are generated, and they merge with old revolutions of subconsciousness and product under the magnetic influence of turns and choking human comedy. Multicolored fairy tale essence of such “Items” or art pieces introduces turbulent terrain of ingredients, zoomed in traces and grouped micro ingredients as metaphorical molecules.
A distance from general chaos is revealed, numerous moods and inventory statics of items follows the condition of humanity sentenced to biological, sensual and social crush. On that trajectory one can separately apprehend figure offer as a part of stoicism ground rule where the artist copies and supports, at the same time and contrary, epicurean joyfulness.Notifying inter-tangling of paradoxes is also visible in the structure of new pieces of art. It comes to the vivisection of collective psychological performance of freedom and use via role model of painting digital domination. Multi item, media and none the less deafening oppressive marketing visuality match in the merging of microscopic trajectory of molecules of sole drops of defence or mixed color inside the limiting contours of the show.
It seems that refuge from the multiplying exhaustion of forms and genres of contemporary art, as well as from the power of the media, is found in consistent personal devotion. Cultivation of painting and sense of skill, in its true virtues, confirms that the reflections of reality can be overcome through specially nurtured abilities. Zoran Tešanović appears as an artist who continues ‘famous fantasies’, becoming a messenger of the vitality of the masked world of universal relations.
