Sulphurous greens, amaranth reds and sudden coral flashes. Nocturnal shimmers, pearly pallors and darting radioactive fluorescences. An ostentatiously superficial painting, where all the events stand out adamantinely in the foreground. Thin layers of shadow reveal traces of now vanished co-presences, diaphanous lights model the forms, supernatural flashes of endogenous light leak out from a mysterious elsewhere.
Danilo Stojanović, “L’ironia dell’ignoto”, installation view, courtesy CAR gallery, Bologna
An elsewhere that our perceptive habits usually lead us to imagine behind the chromatic skin, but that the obstinate two-dimensionality of this painting spitefully places in the realm of the impalpable and the ultra-thin, challenging us to glimpse it with our mind between one layer and another of a compact color devoid of visual access to its visceral substrate. Contemplating Danilo Stojanović’s paintings gives the sensation of being on the brink of a spell that crouches in the painting waiting for even the slightest hint of surrender on a logical level to swallow us in its magical vortex, as fatal as the song of the Sirens that overturned the destiny of Ulysses and his companions on the sea. These are the unmistakable atmospheres into which the painting of the Croatian artist, currently based in Milan, invites us to delve, who after two years returns to the CAR gallery in Bologna with a new solo exhibition.
Danilo Stojanović, “The Scentless Bunch”, 2024, oil and sawdust on linen, 80 x 100 cm, courtesy CAR gallery, Bologna
“The irony of the unknown” presents a selection of recent works that show the persistence and evolution of his research, always marked by an interest in a disjointed and visionary figuration counterpointed by an extremely precise and flexible use of the pictorial medium, conducted through a chromatic palette that does not allow any derogation from its own stringent internal coherence. As suggested by the title, surreality is the main subject of his paintings, which we could define as a pictographic transpositions of dreamlike sensations operated through a sort of imaginative automatism that seems to ignore specific subjective memories to draw on a distillate of mysterious suggestions all internal to painting. Reminiscences of historicized movements such as Italian Metaphysics, Surrealism or Magic Realism emerge not as citations, but as visual concretizations of a syncretic language that demonstrates the naturalness with which the artist has introjected these suggestions to the point of making them a homogeneous distillate suspended in a timeless space. The most disturbing aspect of his visions lies, in my opinion, precisely here, in the spell of a painting capable of conferring an everlasting quality to sketches of images that are intrinsically undefined, fragmentary, instinctive and fleeting.
Danilo Stojanović, “Dusk Flowers”, 2024, oil on linen, 80 x 90 cm, courtesy CAR gallery, Bologna
In this process abstraction and figuration appear almost interchangeable: if on the one hand certain flat areas, normally positioned in the background, seem to be pregnant with indefinable figurative holds, on the other hand even the most recognizable details of objects, plants or bodies appear equally indecipherable in their being alternately isolated from the whole from which they derive, chromatically turned into shades inconsistent with their supposed real referent or synthesized as pure silhouettes. What fascinates the artist, therefore, is not so much the mystery of an unspeakable fairy tale to be reconstructed by freely connecting his actants summoned on the canvas, but the much deeper enigma of a painting that seems to create itself when he activates his dowsing sensitivity to make its possible manifestations emerge from the indistinct infinity in which they potentially dwells. And the evocation of such painting has for him the consistency of a rite to be prepared with method: the careful choice of the linen canvas, the meticulous preparation of the support with the ancient technique of rabbit skin dissolved in water, the drawing of the most minute details on paper to be transposed at a later time into the final composition, the concentration to directly pour the most expressive aspects by improvising on the pictorial plane.
Danilo Stojanović, “Balancing Act”, 2024, oil on linen, 22 x 16 cm, courtesy CAR gallery, Bologna
For Stojanović, the painting is a talisman-object, whose tangible physicality constitutes the prerequisite for the reality and effectiveness of the visions it contains, ready to expand into the spectator’s space as soon as his gaze locks onto them. In the same way, the mental game of thicknesses that is established between the partial superimpositions of figurative fragments and chromatic layers put into play, although not perceptible on a material level, paradoxically emphasizes the virtual projection of the image as a whole, as if it were a pervasive veil that adheres to the eyes of the viewers to irreversibly condition their reading of the visible. Even the details of bodies present in the compositions, such as the ghostly faces and the recurring witch-like hands, contribute to breaking down the diaphragm between the representation and the observers, instilling in the latter the doubt that what they see is perhaps nothing other than the reflection of those parts of themselves that the spell of painting has already trapped in the image. The choice to experiment with medium and small formats in this series converges towards the same intention of involvement, which corresponds to the idea of considering the painting as a living and active entity with which to enter into an unmediated relationship, a significant novelty in an artist who in the previous exhibition had miniaturized his enchantments in a potentially endless series of samples of the unknown.
Info:
Danilo Stojanović. The irony of the unknown
21.09.2024 – 16.11.2024
CAR Gallery
Via Azzo Gardino, 14/A – Bologna BO
www.cardrde.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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