Nevena Martinović
ANDREA IVANOVIĆ JAKŠIĆ: THE CREATOR IS ALIVE
In the last ten years the creative process of Andrea Ivanović Jakšić has been concentrated on one segment of her artistic practice.[1] Although its departure point is in the medium of painting and drawing, it is radically distanced from them through a technologically demanding and long process of work with natural materials and matters, arising in specific relief object-paintings or painting-objects.[2] The compound with which the artist works consists of paper, water and binding, shaped by the artist’s hand and afterwards subjected to a controlled effectuation of air, water and fire – that is how Andrea includes nature in the procedure of her work. The origins of her abstract organic forms lie in her relationship to nature which is not passive and representational but exceptionally creative and synthetic in its character – at the same time radically physical, reflective and emotional. As the artist has pointed out several times, her intuition had brought her to philosophers and poets in whose works she was able to recognise and conceptualise her ontological relationship to nature – primarily the works of Heraclitus, Lao-Tse and Nietzsche, as well as Vito Marković and Branko Miljković. Change as the only constant element of existence, opposition in constant dynamism, the unity of everything in nature, the four elements of nature (water, air, fire and earth) – those are the general Heraclitan premises and the conceptual bases of Andrea’s objects.
In the three years since her last solo exhibition in Gallery RIMA in 2020[3] the artist has continued to work and develop her authentic objects on all levels. The result is a new group of works produced in 2022 and 2023, after the end of the global corona virus pandemic, which had caused existential imperil to the entire humanity and brought a changed way of living. In the circumstances of the menacing danger, unending anxiety and growing alienation, societies were overwhelmed with political and economic crises and individuals were overcome by the crises of self- and world-perception and consequently, by the crises of overall meaning. In the period of a slow process of discontinuing the “new reality”, which is still existing, we are able to see the consequences and add experiences and lessons of the pandemic period, hoping that our conclusions would be useful both to our personal and collective development. That very wave of (self-)re-examination concerns both the personal life of the artist and the unavoidably changes of her internal energy with which she approaches her work, the dynamism of the creative process and the arisen forms, but primarily influences the reflective source of all the changes. That motivation has found its place in the inscription on the worn-out back of a school chair[4] in the artist’s studio: “Short life!” Written in Andrea’s recognisable capital black letters, direct as a poster-sign and condensed like a slogan, this thought stands simultaneously as a conclusion of the preceding years and an everyday reminder in the days that follow. Instead of a contemplative “memento mori” concept of the intellectual “vita brevis” from Hippocrates’ maxim, Andrea’s title is more an intimate and spontaneous exclamation to life and represents a phase of a more intensive experience of oneself and nature, unavoidably leaving its track in her art.
[1] In her work begun during her studies of painting at the Art Academy in Novi Sad, the artist has worked in gifferent media and realised different artworks – from works on paper to three-dimensional objects and assemblages with ready-made elements.
[2] The difference rests on the morphology of an object, the procedure of their creation and the closeness of the final work with the medium of the painting. In more details in: N. Martinović, „Preobražaji prirode (i) umetnosti: O stvaralaštvu Andree Ivanović Jakšić” (“The transformation of nature (and) art: about the creative process of A. I. J.), catalogue foreword, Andrea Ivanović Jakšić, Galerija RIMA, Kragujevac-Beograd 2020.
[3] The exhibition was a joint project comprising two displays realised simultaneously in Gallery RIMA in Belgrade (14 October – 15 November 2020.) and Kragujevac (16 October – 20 November 2020.).
[4] When old and torn school chairs in the Elementary School where Andrea teaches visual culture, she was able to keep a few back supports otherwise planned for garbage. These skratched, frayed boards represent a new part of the collection of assembled objects which supply the artist with sparks of inspiration, mostly taken from nature or composed of natural materials (leather, stone, bones, wood, etc.).
All the works produced in the last two years are unified by the same frenetic energy manifested in the strengthening of the already established elements and characteristics of Andrea’s art. In instances where the object is built in layers and projected into the space of the observer, its forms are more opulent than before, they swirl becoming more complex than originally contemplated, expanding over the given frameworks without any logic or pattern. The artist consciously avoids the possibility of disciplining her forms, making condensed and chaotic shapes with no given structural theses. In relation to her previous works, her latest objects express a wild and inarticulate character. I follow what is alive 1 and 2, Exile, Fervent search 1 and 2, and particularly the monumental objects such as Life – life goes on, Frightening surface – sublime depth and its companion piece Sublime surface – frightening depth – are totally devoid of the previous slightly geometric dynamics of expansion and freed from a rational control over the whole. The balance between art and nature, so vital for Andrea’s creative activity, has been moved in these objects in favour of the natural matter whose creation is the necessity of life and not aesthetics. Therefore, one imagines that with the latest group of works of seemingly raw and non-whetted appearance the artist intends to renew the awareness of her own pure existence and not its character or specific quality. To return, after the experienced absurd and insecurity of pandemic life, to the source of life and its acknowledgement. In her artistic praxis that return is manifested by the resetting of her creative procedure to the basic default – her organic need for creation and the initial inarticulate energy of the experience and relationship to nature. In certain works that default reset is marked by exclusion of the final act of incineration and burning of the matter that emphasises the individual identity of the object. Instead, the matter is left denuded in its original whitish hue. Such an object – I am breathing-in unpredictability – breathing-out unpredictability, shows, as indicated by its title, the most unpredictable dynamism: when sharp rectilinear incisions are mixed with the wavy ones, when sharpened bulges interplay with the hilly ones, and everything is arranged in inarticulate rhythms of the solidification and separation of forms. It seems that the major artist’s effort in this work is to avoid the effects of organisation and of an established pattern, and then to leave along the already anticipated path in order to find adequate expression for the most potent initial energy of chaos that precedes the establishment of the first arrangement, form, cycle. Before we go on with the theme of who is who and what is it, Andrea’s new works convey the message she had emphasised herself in one of the titles: The creator is alive!
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