Seascapes/Into The Wave

Questioning already adopted and further developed procedural solutions and procedures, in a discipline that is according to its basic media determinant a static art, led Lidija Delić to step out from the two-dimensional state of the painter’s object into the ambience and to thus make her paintings become active in the surroundings. The heart of the matter of the multimedia three dimensional installation entitled Seascapes/Into The Wave that consists of paintings-sculptures, a video projection and ambient sound is anchored by her interest in the complexity of the question of one’s experience of the relationship between movement and existence.Bipartite in its form, in the material and conceptual sense, the exhibition is realized as a coherent whole; individual fragments of this whole were developed by means of establishing their relations with the entirety of the exhibition. Through recognizable visual statements, dreamlike in their contents and form, Lidija Delić skilfully transposes suggestible atmosphere from her previous painting series of Ambience and Into The Wave in the imaginatively transformed physical space of the gallery. In order to open a possibility for the viewer to gradually engage with the event, the artist plays the sensory games of slowing down the time, suspending, pausing, overlapping and of the state of inaction, triggering certain psycho-physical sensations in the viewer and leading him thus from one plane of the reality into another, from physical to sensory space.

Lidija Delić most often creates her works in series, because this artist reflects the occurrences, phenomena or objects for which she is interested in their perpetual movement, or, sequential existence. This time, the aesthetic seaside scenes presented, the Seascapes, are directed towards a different sculptural language. In her drawings on marble plates, we can detect only the movements of a figure from place to another, without any transformation. As opposed to the Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of the decomposition of movement, and closer to the ideas of Henri Bergson, movement in her drawings is set in the realm of duration. It is not a line, because a line is created only after a section of path has already been covered, after a completed action. The artist discloses to us that everything, even the seemingly solid and unchangeable object such as the marble plate is also an event, or to be more precise, multiple flows of events – which are revealed to us in a rich texture of the material as a layer of time. Time represents the coexistence of all the other levels of existence, it differs from the line, space or number, or any other category perceptible by the reason, because a large part of the things built on the experiences derived from these events is not located in the realm of the directly visually perceptible things.

In the juxtaposition with the marble plates, there is an adapted video sequence taken from a Hollywood film, The Swimmer (1968). By changing speed, size and orientation of the projected image, another hub of events is being opened. And while the medium of video relativizes the viewer’s experience of temporality, the slow motion plane slowly leads him into a situation that is similar to an oneiric state, in which his internal perception of time is modified. Slowing down of the picture provides for a spiritual and mental sensation, and at the same time the parameters of light, movement and sound are being subordinated to variations, repetitions, alternations, recycling. Finally, the sound too becomes independent, and owing to its autonomy, it gradually gains the status of an image – an archetypical image in the introductory part of The Divine Comedy that the Poet uses to begin his journey.

In the intersection of space that is visible and space that thinks, in her work Seascapes/Into The Wave, the artist temporarily suspends the everyday life and in an intimate conjunction of her own internal space makes the viewer an active participant through an experience that is close to meditation. She enables the viewer to project the contents of their own unconsciousness onto the images offered, and to thus initiate or resume discovery and measuring of their own internal space.

Miloš Zec