THE ART OF SPARTAK DULICH
By Branko Franceschi,
Director-curator Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, Croatia. 2016
Historical avant-gardes and especially their successors during the period after World War II, aimed with their radical strategies to eradicate the traditional visual arts disciplines and concept of an art object. Simultaneously, they fostered the active participation of the artists and arts in shaping everyday life and society, and they finally formed the contemporary visual culture and its creative paradigm.
In this constellation once-dominant, the artistic discipline of painting lost its exclusive status of medium, which throughout history most clearly reflected the perception of reality and the world as it was defined by mankind. After a period of oblivion or even the death of painting – as the aspiring theoreticians who believed in the supremacy of technology and methods of then-new media art and practice, in general, proclaimed at the turn of the millennium – the period of its strong revival and particularly of its figurative version followed. However, paintings by the referential painters of the current generation are more inspired by film, TV, or photography regarding the imagery and by the insights of post-conceptual artists in terms of conception and methodology than the legacy of their own art discipline.
This is most evident in their attitude towards the abstract painting, which, after its triumph in the previous century, for the majority of young artists seems to be out of sight and interest.
Of course, this is only a summary of global trends, without considering the specifics of their reflections in the inexhaustible field of artistic subjectivity in which art production is ultimately based and which often achieves public attention only after the culmination of its vital contribution to the general scheme of things has inevitably already been surpassed.
Spartak Dulić’s oeuvre is the ideal example of the statements mentioned above. He is an artist whose practice in relation to the objective potential of its social and communicative possibilities developed in the self-induced autistic vacuum, despite his professional participation in the mainstream cultural system – even if only in such a marginalized district such Subotica is today. It is a trait which we, thanks to the last remaining echoes of Romanticism, still like to consider as a glimmer of genuine artistic nature. Dulić’s participation in the field of public cultural practices is marked by contradictions.
His art practice as a whole is shaped in accordance with contemporary multidisciplinary artistic standards, including its spillover into the curatorial field.
Still, due to his luck (or, maybe, his disadvantage), his aesthetic discourse and personal poetics are developed outside of any trendy formulation.
Simply, Dulić has created a unique formula that combines various procedures and concepts that marked the art of the modern epoch.
To start with, Dulić belongs to the generation artistically formed in the Nineties, at the moment when multi-media art was already established as the mainstream format of the moment to which multiple, and varied artistic disciplines and procedures of post-conceptual art practice converged.
Although he graduated from the class of professor Ante Kuduz at the Department of Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Dulić’s oeuvre from the early days included art installations and performances.
After experimenting with sound and text (Spartak was the founder of a post-punk, hip-hop group Lepak / The Glue), and aesthetics of comics and street graffiti, Dulić became a true representative of the generation that regarded avant-garde strategy of blending academic with popular culture as self-understandable and practiced it spontaneously. This extensive creative discourse Dulić will most distinctively consolidate in the conceptual, performative, and material aspects of his painting oeuvre.
The selection of paintings shown here represents
the cycle executed after 2008.
However, their peculiar performing method Dulić has been developing during the previous years, which includes very indicative collages, small in size, and composed as three-dimensional structures of superimposed colored papers.
The compositions of his large paintings essentially represent two-dimensional painted reductions of these spatial collages, and therefore Dulić considers them derivates of Cubist’s solution of the real space representation in the two-dimensional painting medium. This is where begins Dulić’s characteristic accumulation of various painting methods chosen according to the key of their suitability to his own artistic idiom.
Thus his painting method involves more historically validated procedures, which in the end essentially make it a compendium of the better part of the 20th-century painting.
According to the chronology, the implementation of the appropriation of the surrealist automatism method followed, aiming at mental catharsis and realization of a trans-rational balance of painted compositions. Dulić’s painting process also includes a performative method of painting by circling around the canvas positioned on the floor.
It is the method introduced by Jackson Pollock, the founder of Abstract Expressionism, from which art of performance emerged from and which,
as we recall, also represents a part of Dulić’s extensive creative repertoire.
After this procedure, the final orientation of the painting is determined by Dulić’s assessment during the final stages of painting and is subsequently fixed by the positioning of his signature and date. References to historical painting methods are complemented by the unorthodox choice of the painting material that, following the Neo-avant-garde poetics of the Sixties, includes a wide variety of working materials such as façade paints, enamels, spray paints and markers, and which significantly affect the final look of the image.
The last in this series of recognizable appropriated procedures is the so-called street art practice i.e., wall paintings, graffiti, and murals, already contaminated by the strong tradition of comic art. Taking them back to the studio, alongside the sporadic paintings on walls in public spaces, Dulić has integrated them into his eclectic painting procedures. Analysis of his composite painting method nicely illustrates how deep – and for our times atypical – is Dulić’s inveterateness in the genesis of visual arts of the modern epoch. It is recognizable in his compositions’ rich visual vocabulary and even more in their meticulously painted details.
What we see at the exhibition as a consistent result of Dulić’s synthetic capabilities are displays of complex, intertwined, and seemingly endless systems of forms that fully meet formats of canvases. Following the selected painting materials, Dulić is not interested in variations of color tones and hues, and their sporadic modulations are the result of spraying techniques.
He mainly paints with the spectrum’s primary colors, straight from the containers, which adds to the intensity of his paintings akin to printing techniques.
This visual reminiscence of the world of comics has been further strengthened by the black line drawings with which Dulić articulates colored fields in tangled, meandering forms. For those who like visual metaphors or cannot do without them, Dulić’s paintings open views into the dynamic interior with a density that strongly reminds of living organisms as well as machines, or rather on their futuristic bionic amalgam. Because of the described specificity of his artistic expression,
I consider Dulić’s paintings a serious contribution to the rich tradition of Organic Abstraction, style with which the great revolution of abstract art begun and which remained one of its enduring characteristics to this day.
If we return to the initial thesis, Dulić’s painting oeuvre confirms the predictable fate of a genuine artist placed in a cultural province where his artistic personality already at the time of its realization is condemned at marginalization within the value systems at the national and international level.
In the context of painting as a selected discipline, we can generally conclude that despite the discipline’s turbulent recent history and largely thanks to the pragmatism of the art market, the painting proved to be indestructible and irreplaceable in spite of relentless tide of new technologies of visual expression.
Dulić’s position within these two extremes may remind us of the proverbial local metaphor of watchtower neither in heaven nor on earth. No matter how cruel to the artist’s ambitions and subsistence or romantic, given the pragmatic functioning of the cultural system it may seem, isn’t it in the end exactly what by nature and our expectations the artist’s position should be?
SPARTAK DULICH | PAINTINGS 2008-2016
Curated by Branko Franceschi,
Director-curator Museum of Modern Art,
Zagreb, Croatia. 2016
Read the full Article on Art Market Magazine Issue #47
