Nevena Martinović
EARLY PARISIAN PAINTINGS BY ĐORĐE IVAČKOVIĆ

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In March 1963 Ivačković exhibited simultaneously in two galleries – first at the inaugural exhibition of the Gallery L’Oleil de Boeuf and not a full week afterwards, at his first solo exhibition in the Gallery La Soleil dans la Tȇte. Although a newcomer, Ivačković exhibited in L’Oleil de Boeuf together with the painters and sculptors of diverse poetics, generations and status, and among them even those proponents of post-war expressive abstraction such as Gérard Schneider, Jean Mesagier, Paul Jenkins, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Martin Barré, Albert Bitran, Key Sato and others. Michel Ragon wrote a short introduction to the exhibition catalogue, but a decade later, in the fourth volume of abstract art survey – L’Art abstrait - he would classify Ivačković in the category of artists who consistently developed the painting of lyrical abstraction. On the one hand, the linking of Ivačković with the post-war French painting tradition was a significant confirmation of the etymology of his painterly language. The masters of French and American post-war abstraction were, according to the artist, his only “teachers” of painting and this essentially differed from the generation of artists in Belgrade in the 1950s. His closeness to the painters of lyrical abstraction and abstract expressionism was the most recognisable in the procedure and consequently on the level of form. Namely, Ivačković created his paintings in short intervals, without any preparations or subsequent finishing touches, almost in a single breath, with an accentuated physical engagement in the case of larger works he painted on paper or canvas stretched on the floor of his studio. The creative process, appearing to be spontaneous and unpredictable, showed its results in transparent and free strokes of the brush, intertwined with elements outside the artist’s control, such as splashing of the paint along the margins of a gesture or fragmentary prints of the soles of his shoes. For the admirers and defenders of the “hot” line of abstraction, gathered around the magazine Cimaise, headed by Michel Ragon and Georges Boudaille, Ivačković continued the post-war developments of expressive abstraction in his creative process and the morphology of his painting. On the other hand, as pointed out by Paule Gauthier in her essay published in the magazine Cimaise, to follow lyrical abstraction in the 1960s was in fact the sign of a retrograde painterly poetics, not at all related to Ivačković’s works.

The specific quality of Ivačković’s expression was connected to its very source, as pointed rather early by the art critic Jean-Jacques Lévéque in the catalogue of Ivačković’s first solo show in Gallery Le soleil dans la Tȇte in 1963. By comparing Ivačković’s gestures with the strokes of Thelonious Monk on the piano keys Lévéque introduced the thesis about a constitutive link between Ivačković’s painting and jazz music, which the artist himself would confirm as crucial in several of his statements. In the years that followed, the art critics of Paris wrote about Ivačković’s “rhythmic variations” and his “study of graphism in the climate of jazz”. On the occasion of the large exhibition L’âge du jazz in the Museum Galliéra in 1967 Ivačković was classified among those artists whose relationship to jazz was not literary or contextual, but who have jazz within themselves in their views and behaviour. In his book Lectures des arts Jean Luc Chalumeau signified a specific relationship between Ivačković’s painting and jazz as the key indicator that it was neither a continuation nor a repetition of the precepts of his antecedents and paragons. Ivačković’s painting is not an embodiment of hidden internal psychological content and it does not stem from his experience of nature (as in the case of the fifties abstract paysagism) but it has its source in jazz and represents the transposition of music through artis’s experience into the form of painting.

Another, equally important, characteristic of Ivačković’s painting, which those sufficiently sagacious observers noticed in his early works from 1963, was related to his exceptional care of the nature of his picture as an autonomous reality with its own autonomous clear and defined rules and characteristics. Only in the early 1970s Georges Boudaille and Paule Gauthier introduced the concepts of “control” and “organisation” with regard to Ivačković’s painting. The artist himself called his creative procedure “pre-programmed automatism”, thus indicating that the rapid and seemingly uncontrolled work process was in fact managed by the knowledge of internal relationships between artistic elements, deposited in artist’s subconscious thanks to his precious experiences. The lines are executed with free gestures, spots contain accidental splashes, one can recognise the unplanned imprint of a palm, but interrelationships and the distribution of lines, spots, surfaces within the field of a picture are no accidents, nor are they the product of unconscious forces that lead the painter’s hand. At this place it is important to look back onto the past in Ivačković’s diary from the period 1962-1972, still a primary document for the understanding of his method and thinking process about a painting. We are talking about the two most abundant diary notebooks, completely dedicated to the analyses of internal and external elements of a picture and their interrelations – lines, surfaces, colours, but also the material, the foundation, painterly tools, the procedure of picture-making and finally, the size, format, the positioning of a painting in space – in other words, they concern mostly the constitutive elements of a picture as an entity that exists for itself, between the artist and the observer, but outside of them both. Contrary to earlier journals mostly written in the first person singular, in these pages Ivačković uses impersonal form of short analytical notes where one can frequently notice a quasi-scholarly approach, such as the radical example of the description of creative process in the form of exponential function. In the years when the majority of works displayed at the exhibition in Gallery RIMA were produced, Ivačković analyses in detail the possibilities and character of “surface modulation” (of a painting) and illustrates them with numerous sketches, so that even in the paintings from the same period one can recognise “modulation” only in lines (for example Painting 16/11/63) or in the combination of lines and surfaces from the same period (Painting 7/1/63), then “modulations of the surface with deep effect” (Painting 26/6/63), or “simple and superficial modulation (for example Painting 27/5/63). Ivačković uses consistently the concept of “modulation” from the theory of sound and music and in this context represents a micro-confirmation of the radical influence on his relationship to painting, executed by music on the one hand and the analytical thinking on the other (a result of his education in music and architecture).

Without a more detailed examination of the contents of Ivačković’s diaries, it is crucial to mention that the period when the artist problematised the painting in this way – between 1962 and 1973 – coincides with the historic moment of early appearances of the analytical or fundamental paining in the world, including France where the leading position along this line of contemporary abstraction was held by members of the group Support/Surface (the group existed between 1966 and 1972). In the 1970s, when the analytical abstraction became one of the leading contemporary tendencies in painting, in Ivačković’s model of painting the balance between the expressive and structural aspect was changing in favour of the latter. Owing to that, art critics detected for the first time the fact that Ivačković’s painting rested equally on the organisation of artistic elements and free gestures, on the control of the painted field and on his unpredictable painting process. In the conclusion based on contemporary impressions about Ivačković’s painting Jean Luc Chalumeau positioned him at the converging point of two opposite models of abstraction in French art, colloquially known as “hot” and “cold”, which he enclosed in the concepts of “lyrical tradition and abstract landscape” and “geometric tradition and analytical abstraction”.

Just as the encounter with the works of lyrical abstraction of the 1950s redirected Ivačković’s already existing creative contemplation and activity in the field of music to the area of painting, so the wave of analytical abstraction contributed to the strengthening and emphasising those characteristics that had already existed in his early paintings from Paris. If we look back on seven pictures painted on 27 June 1963, containing not more than two or three brush strokes, it will become quite clear that they were not primarily about expression and jazz, but about re-examination of the field of painting and its “modulation” just as the artist noted in his diary from the same year. And finally, if we compared Painting 22/3/63 with his masterpiece Painting 4/6/77 we would recognise the same painterly unification which had for decades kept the balance of the symbiotic relationship that supported the authenticity of Ivačković’s painting through a proportionate emphasis on expressiveness and subjugated structure, or vice versa.