Lidija Delić

As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.

John Steinbeck

The new series of works by Lidija Delić represent a continued intensive research of the nature and potential of media used (painting, drawing and photography) as well as the themes tackled generally related to the complex perceptional and emotional experience of the time-space relation. The artist’s initial interest in this subject was expressed through a series of works during her undergraduate years, focused on form and experiments regarding composition. Furthermore, in her first larger series of drawings and painting („Surface“, „Sofas“ and „Ambience“), she more clearly and consistently develops certain conceptual and procedural methods and solutions which will become constants in her subsequent artistic practice. One of the most important is the method of reduction, which the artist elaborates through a fine art aspect as well as within the context of the possibility to convey and transmit poetic and symbolic connotations of a piece and open it for further interpretations alike. That process is in the sense of the artist’s motive reflected through the careful observation of the every-day, phenomenal and figural surrounding, and discovering the particularities of its existence in details, minute, obscure segments and simplicity. The discovered and subsequently noted scenes open up to the artist in their unexpected strength and crucial event points, temporal and emotional courses. Fragments of deserted interiors, sequences of outdoor situations, urban spaces, beaches, swimming areas and horizons become a condensed mark of the world in the course of its enactment. Firstly photographed and then transferred to a canvas, the visual content and sensations are found in the artist’s characteristic figurative-poetic approach – dissolved, deconstructed and analysed in a repetitive fashion, and finally cleared to a brilliant, mute whiteness. Even when they retain some manifestations of the real, they do so primarily to emphasise fragility and instability, the dimension in which they continue to exist – a concoction of emotions, thoughts and anticipations. In the works of Lidija Delić, the image of the world glimmers in light, emptiness and suggestiveness; it is quiet and meditative, envisioned so that we could surrender to its persistence and exclusiveness, just like the artist does.

Text by Miroslav Karić