Ljubica Arsić
Before the mirror was invented, a look that searched for it had appeared. This look had already foreseen a room with countless mirrors, which would later be called the art of painting by optics experts, bearing in mind that it is nothing but a series of attempts: how to portray the observed and the observer.
The task of the art researcher who would embark on interpreting the painted looks would seem a bit silly, but with a very wise outcome. However, it could never be compared with the general history of human madness fraught with suffering of the innocent, massacre of the helpless, with the rumble and bawl of two leaders from whom the stronger or the more ruthless one will earn a place of honour on the square. The drama of looks is more modest, less pathetic, far from the well-known bloodshed children learn about in schools. It is an intimate and chamber drama, free concerning the methods, but binding concerning the conclusion, its outcome does not call for tragedy, but it can sadden, it is the essence of the encounter and the requiem of parting, a drama that needs no words. Hence, let us pay homage to the look through centuries. To the one that analyses us with no shame, which speaks to us impudently just when we wanted to withdraw from the exhibition, to sneak out of the museum, satisfied with our knowledge of the art of painting. Lookomania might not be a story with a moral, history that is magistra vitae, but it would show how people looked at each other through centuries and how they understood each other, how a man, painting a woman, saw her being and her look addressed to him, to the painter, the observer, the male mirror, to the whole world.
That brave researcher would have to take into account all those rueful looks of madonnas who still do not know about the perspective, the seductiveness of the anorexic Venus of Lucas Cranach and the self-awareness of Velasquez’s infanta, the feline look of Mona Lisa who has just swallowed a mouse and can not digest it. His inner camera would have to capture the penetrating impudity of the nude Giorgione’s nursing woman, in front of whom the curious observer suddenly appeared on the other side of the picture, the charmingness captured in a moment in Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring, the provocative superiority of Manet’s pale-skinned excursionist among skilled men and Olympia whose look got used to fencing with the male, the innate sensuality of Rubens’ Helena Fourment, soft and smooth just like the fur she wrapped herself in, Gauguin’s Tahitian women who look with their nipples over a bowl of mango blossoms. These would also include Andy Warhol’s Marilyn and Liz Taylor, whose diffused looks were, using the silkscreen printing technique, soaked in melancholic bluntness caused by alcohol and narcotics.
The list would certainly not be complete without women’s looks from paradise depicted in the exciting and bold pictures of Zoran Tešanović.
In the midst of tame menagerie overgrown with roses and ferns, time does not exist. It will appear later, after the expulsion. Everything is stopped on the move, on the paradise merry-go-round whose wheel had long ceased to rotate. The circular motion of the mythical merry-go-round on which scenes cyclically change by gods’ will shall be replaced by a linear walk through History. But painter Tešanović wishes to depict the time when everything was at the same time, when things existed side by side, just like in fairy tales and dreams.
In the light without shadows, at times gentle and innocent like in Giotto’s paintings as humanity probably once used to be, at times angry, spiced with neon, shimmering glow of commercials blended with Almodovarian boldness and intrusiveness so that the colour leaks in the field of vision, flows into the observer’s eye and provokes, lies wise Eve on the throne covered with a prick-and-pounce embroidered sheet. Her hand slightly raised in the manner of the great female rulers, with forefinger accentuating nonchalantly, confirms the security with which she looks into future scenes of her own expulsion. She is carnelian-like exuberant and yet at the same time she is burnt out. Chaste and perverse, feminine and masculine, so vast in nature that it can hold all that is needed to withstand and to move on.
In a red sexy gown holding a pipe of an Indian fortune-teller, with nude genitals and with a face that features a woman’s doomed fate which she bears in the disdainful peace and concentration, she looks at what is outside, beyond the paradise gate. Her look goes over the horizon, to the areas filled with arabesques reminiscent of old-fashioned roller painting and tamed by geometry that reconciles the world of shapes and the world of ideas. There is also a snake, wrapping around a tree resembling a sugar candy. In her look, Eve’s sin transformed into reflection in thought, meditation over destiny. Her offence is the consequence of the lack of perspicacity and a misconception that men and women develop evenly, it is a late and fatal finding that the immature, infantile Adam should by no means have consumed the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Not yet fully developed, with the heart of Peter Pan and Superman’s muscles, he will wish to camouflage moral dilemmas and longing for power with the atrocities of History.
Only after expulsion shall paradise beasts show their teeth. So far, in Tešanović‘s paradise, they are wind-up toys, plush puppy toys for sleeping, which can be bought in every major supermarket, a lion with red boots, weaving between one’s feet and roaring with the wind, Borges’ tigers spinning on the fair merry-go-rounds, the white unicorn of the Self in Jung’s alchemy, whose holy horn transforms into a profane New Year’s hat with pompon. They all resemble that corner of consciousness, that long gone time conserved in our being, when a man talked with animals, when he understood their divine nature. As soon as a hunter turned up with a blade in his hands, ready to kill and eat them, the agreement was gone. Only Eve, a shaman, remained, to communicate with nature, through animals, in accordance with her birth mission.
Zoran Tešanović portrays nature as a clear, green lush field without caves in which the future hunter will draw his totems. Paradise is a place where there is no hiding, there is no shame. The colours are rude and daring, glistening on the fur or on the pupils of a black cat, wildwood-like on a cockatoo’s feather, challenging by themselves, and not at the service of painting the matter. In paradise it does not matter whether something is greasy or smooth, whether it is made of plush or waterproof plastic. Through the transparent and diluted air around Adam, Eve and the apple impaled on the scepter, amoeboid creatures, the favourites of Joan Miró are still floating, the pulsing organisms of the great former ocean, the warm uterus from which everything was created. It is amazing how the ease of the scene was painted, the calmness that seems to last forever even though a fall is on the way. There is no fantasy, the reality is glorious. Eve is sitting still posing for a monument to a woman. The later earthly false gardens will be full of fantasies in which a woman is burnt out like Andersen’s little match girl, freezing on an icy street while dreaming of a fire in the stove. Sometimes this fantasy is in the head, sometimes it comes from a bottle with a drink or a needle, or a room equipped with a bed and a stranger. With him it is so easy to act out the little match girl, that awakes frozen and dead.
For now, the time that stands still, the landscape in which everything exists simultaneously and forever should be painted. Like those prophetically inspired painters-alchemists who undertook the task of painting archetypes, Zoran Tešanović, finds it astoundingly easy as well. With the courage to tell the story with colours, he plays with symbols like a magician pulling out a rabbit (that of Alice) from a hat, he builds a picture the way cards are arranged in card game preference for the benefit of a higher order, just like, at first glance, accidental scenes follow one another in fairy tales supported by the deep logic of growing up, to that “they lived happily ever after”. There is nothing incidental on it, everything is deeply connected by the subtle painting logic, which superiorly twists the story:
She lived happily and satisfied at the beginning of her life. Tešanović’s Eve is a woman at her home. She is pervaded by awe and a vision of liberation from the everyday demand and from worry, from her own and other people’s nagging. Sometimes a Lolita with a white collar and socks over which Nabokov will build a peculiar epiphany of the forbidden one-day flight of a butterfly full of adolescent bawdy vocabulary with curses as the lobby of a mystical erotic rite. Sometimes a prophet wrapped in a black coat holding a pipe peace with cloudlike smoke wafting up, in a blazing menagerie that can only terrify a boy taken to the zoo for the first time. But not Eve. A tamer gazing into the horizon, who, whenever she feels like it, stops the fair merry-go-round with a leisurely gesture. What does she see there? Perhaps that Bergman’s procession of men from The Seventh Seal, playing a crusader’s game of death on a glade. The princess who disappears from the battlefield because she got bored with this dragon killing game. In one picture she appears as a mermaid. The golden scale is her halo, her enlightenment, which covers from the waist downward the part of the body related to nature and birth, her martyrdom before the trident of the rapist Poseidon.
Never Eve the healer who caresses with kindness and care.
It is good to be generous, lovable and compassionate, but only to a certain extent. The woman’s urge to “cure and fix everything” was put into question on Tešanović’s paintings, in the very Eve’s look. The need to heal is in fact a big trap built from what one’s own culture expects from women, and this is mainly the pressure to prove that they are not idle, occupying a place and having fun, but that they carry the value that will redeem them, that they truly do possess some value and therefore should be allowed to live.
Phantasmagoric scenes from the paradise “cartoon”, in the conception that possesses the sophistication of urban sensitivity painted through colouration resembling illuminated window displays, billboards and neon advertising, refer to Eve before Sex and Adam before History. But, just like Borges’ Aleph contains all these dimensions at the same time, so do humanities exist on Tešanović’s omnibus, along with innocence, Eve’s seductiveness and the arrogance of belligerent Adam. Painted men, resembling the lead soldiers boys play with, are also boys themselves with unconcentrated look despite everything, absorbed in the game of pirates, with a black eyepatch. They are plunderers of other people’s treasure, small Napoleons with “butterfly” for winding, unprepared bishops brought to the battlefield. Their mirror is on the knife blade, on polished metal of the weapon. There, instead of on the brook, they are seeking for their Narcissus.
In front of some of Tešanović’s paintings, like for example, Almodovar and Utopia of the Pirates, the water of the Deluge truly does break through. Everything is seen differently through it, twisted and hazy, disunited and expanded, unnaturally narrowed in a fair tunnel with water instead of a mirror. Everything seems as though being observed through the liquid. In this case, dense, oily, as possessed by those strange devices through which the coloured bubbles ripple and wiggle, and which appear in Almodovar’s films, to emphasize the density and mixing of human juices, like in the film Talk to her.
Fish, shaken by water cataclysm, rush to settle in tins. Everything got spoiled and distorted, the body is unsettled and is trying to resemble the saving ark from which Eve waves the red scarf to the one departing. Now her look is transparent blue, lost and diffused, and filled with water, with her tears.
