LOGIC OF THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE between LIFE AND DEATH
Screen installation by Boris Petrović “Honey Be Or Not To Bee”
Boris Petrović is a painter who explores hybrid and critical boundaries, and certainly the relationships between static and dynamic ‘images’ with audio presentation and spatial installation. He starts from the ‘problems’ within painting and transitions into the production of media digital images. For him, the image is now a structural (surface, spatial, object, screen, visual, audiovisual, tactile, haptic, behavioral) order of presenting messages and visual events in space and time. Such an image appears in the process of sensory-media presentation of various receptive parameters, from bodily affect to intelligible meaning. The image can be explained as the effect of production, exchange, and reception of sensory affectation and intelligible meaning in relation to the viewer’s eye and the body that watches and moves in the audiovisual space. His work is primarily focused on hiding and revealing the visible and invisible – which can also be the unveiling of the depictability of life and death. The key words of his work are light, honey, the invisible, the struggle for life, the visible, and movement.
Boris Petrović’s painting and media work is established around an almost obsessive search and recycling of models and systems of coded visual records. Several years ago, he worked with barcode models as the initial pattern for creating abstract images. Today, he focuses on Braille. He works with the Braille alphabet, transforming Braille records into initial patterns for creating images. He removes the tactility from the Braille records that the blind rely on to read. The message recorded in Braille is transformed into a visible-invisible relationship for the viewer of his artwork (hand-painted and digital print images). The message is readable to those who know Braille; however, a blind visitor to the exhibition cannot read his record because the message is presented as a flat-smooth print. For the usual sighted visitor who does not know Braille, it is an abstract systemic order of white circles on a black surface. A person – woman, man, child – with ‘normal’ vision will most often see a geometric pattern instead of the message. The message “Let there be light” remains hidden even though it exists in the field of view.
Boris Petrović created the hybrid screen installation “Honey Be Or Not To Be” at the Youth Center Gallery. The installation is set up with a confrontation of three screen surfaces: a billboard with a message written in Braille and two screens with video films. The billboard is realized as a digital print of a black-and-white image with the message “Let there be light” written in Serbian. The image “Let there be light” is one of a series of black-and-white images with this sentence written in Braille in various languages (Serbian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, German, French, Italian, Russian). The billboard (about 2×6.36m) is placed on the large left wall of the gallery. The screens with video works are placed horizontally in a row on the gallery’s front wall. Both video works are shot with a static camera. The left screen shows an enlarged presentation of the slow movement of ants in a pile of honey (59 minutes). The right screen shows the accelerated movement of clouds in the sky (15 seconds). Both video works are looped so that they repeat endlessly. The sound filling the space is emitted from a sound carrier. It is the work of the group Oval: SD II Audio Template from the CD “Folds And Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze.” The sound is also presented as an endless loop.
Before the viewer is a not-so-simple audio-visual-spatial installation, with different perceptual relationships confronted: static images, slow dynamic images, and fast dynamic images. Opposite this phenomenology of the sensory, the semantic role of the message “Let there be light” and the semantic suggestions from the video screens are introduced: the struggle of ants for life with honey and the passing of clouds across the sky. Contrasts and contradictions of the visible, bodily, and intellectual determine the character of this work, i.e., the artist’s struggle in the slipstreams of sensory impact and semantic potentialities. Painting, and here it is primarily about painting in the era of media, is not simply just an ‘image’ here and now, but it is also an event of different types of images. The multiplicity of the image’s appearance and its sensory/intelligible impact is the central problem of this exhibition.
Mishko Shuvakovich
