Sofija Ž. Milenković
ON THE PAINTING OF VELJKO VUČKOVIĆ
The artistic praxis of Veljko Vučković is based on the appropriation of film framing. In the case of his painting it assumes analyses, digital refashioning and translation of the ensuing content into the medium of painting. Over one hundred of seen films and selected „frozen“ shots, along a careful selection of future painterly subjects, represents the beginning of the artist’s research activity leading to the construction of an authentic work.
In the meantime, there is film editing of the shots with a digital treatment, including the adaptation of the image to the proportions of the canvas, the translation of the visual content into a black and white spectrum, rotation, prearrangement and addition of objects as well as the removal of everything unnecessary. In that way, the transformed visual material Vučković transfers to the canvas applying the traditional painterly technique – oil (paint).
The essential technical unit of a film – the shot – functions as a proposal that Vučković analyses, transforms digitally, re-contextualises and translates into a painting by his artistic means. At the same time, understood as a segment of a film in space, the shot represents the borderline – narrower than our field of vision dividing the space into the visible and an invisible zones. The latter, filled with the content of our memory and imagination, Yuri Lotman and Yuri Tsivian call „the meaningful indefiniteness of the film“. Along the same path, Gilles Deleuze speaks about the shot as a “relatively closed space” that organises the elements within a picture – characters, objects, colours, light – and implies the space outside the shot (hors-champ) “refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present”. The film content, outside the shots, can be physical, like sound effects, or conceptual, related to the ideas and added meanings, indicating that a film shot is never a self-sufficient information but always related to something else as well.
Analogous to film shots, the works by Veljko Vučković succeed in translating the specific narrative and psychological qualities of motion pictures into the static medium of a paining which, since different to film, is characterized by its self-sufficiency. In the absence of the temporal dimension, the sound and other physical effects, the artist achieves an almost identical atmosphere with purely artistic means. In strengthening the contrast, in sharpening the contours of the shadow, by counter light, gentle mystifying of the characters and the use of monochromatic palette of grey tones, he enables us to evoke the sound of door creaking and the coldness of a dark cellar (The Eye Dilates). The tension is intensified by the light directed into the viewer by which the artist places him/her in the position of a suspect or at least an accomplice in an unresolved case. We notice particularly the atmosphere of psychological tension and anxiety, expectations or anticipation of the rising threat, in the close-up shot portraits of small dimensions (A Sense of Dread, Darkest Hour). Certain artistic protagonists transfer the atmosphere of control, pursuit, absence of free movement and thinking. All of them are expecting the final result and resolution, be they under investigation or conducting it.
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(Complete text in printed edition)
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