Diving

Working primarily in drawing and painting, over the course of the last five years, Lidija Delić developed a body of work using various formats and techniques. Fascinated by the notions of time and memory, Lidija looks into dreamlike dimensions and elusive forms of existence. The artist creates works that appear somewhat suspended in time, as if they come from some undefined past. Her drawings are both carefully pondered and simultaneously spontaneous, hinting at transitory movements and moments, often evoking familiar interiors, spaces, scenes or landscapes without ever explicitly stating them. Drawing is for Lidija a way of looking, with nondiscriminatory attentivnes, at things and dreamlike phenomena that don’t really come to stasis even in their finished state. The results are not just painterly moments – the drawings seem to embody, similar to film stills, a very cinematic way of looking at bodies or their details and gestures, situations and structures. Democratically discovered[i] and noted scenes open up to the artist in their unexpected strength as the focal points of events, temporal and emotional flows.

She often creates her works in series, since she reflects the appearances, phenomena or objects in their perpetual movement or sequential existence. Displayed on walls and tables in the form of installations, her pieces suggest the cumulative effect of disparate fragments in an incomplete conundrum. The work of Lidija Delić comprises painting, drawing, photography, installation and video and allows for the perspective that invites us to reflect on the time and the reiteration of forgotten memories.

In her newest series titled Diving, an image is again merely the occasion for an artistic articulation of formal intensities. Diving series is substantially informed by the possibilities of an expanded notion of drawing. Lidija’s drawings and paintings are technically playful, shaped by the unpredictable encounters of brush and graphite with canvas and graph paper, and the variable effects of density, light and shade.

The clear and at the same time confusing atmosphere of these images, outlines the state of free fall, a floating zone, typical of our thoughts as they are prior to an illuminating discovery[ii]. The state of free fall also carries a paradox – if there is no ground on which to fall, perhaps we are not aware of the flight. Once we lose the ground under our feet everything around us becomes unstable and acquires a disturbed sense of balance. The painting’s confusing perspective does not illustrate subjective nor objective state, but simply exists as such and as a subject causes it own effect. The optical effects of that indetermination (not using linear perspective) serve to identify a type of positioning, simultaneously ambiguous and precise.

Diving series return the focus on the ones body and physical experience, reminding us that comprehension is never just analyzing mere facts but that it is always experiencing and experimenting. Its enables the viewer to project the contents of her own unconsciousness onto the images offered, and to thus initiate or resume discovery and measuring of their own internal space.

Text: Milos Zec

[i] William Eggleston’s idea of the “democratic camera”.

[ii] Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept described in his book Philosophical Investigations.