Tropiques Nord
Tropiques Nord
Within her new series of works, Tropiques Nord Lidija Delić reveals paintings and drawings, conceptually developed around discursive representations of tropical landscapes and the idea of their de (re) construction. The images from the series were created during and after their stay at the artistic residence in Iceland in 2017, while the installation is inspired by the famous ethnographic inscription Claude Levi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955), which depicts anthropologist’s travels across the territories of the Mato Grosso area in the Amazon.
Tropics (Tropical Zone) denote the Earth’s region, below and above the Equator bounded by the northern and southern returnees. In geographical sciences, the concept of a landscape is somewhat controversial and its primary use remains in the everyday language. Semantically, the landscape is defined through its various physical and geographical characteristics – beauty, uniqueness, integrity, specificity, diversity, harmony and specialty.
Starting from the idea that every geographical territory is bound in a dense set of different material and cultural contexts through which the subjective experience of a certain landscape (scenary) is born, Lidija Delić is moving along the boundary of the unclear boundary between the usual and the unknown, the exotic and the everyday. The splendor of the color palette and the exciting access to the material’s colors are mediators who transcribe the autobot photographs of the north into, the tropes of inspired, pseudo-ethnographic transmission of unknown territories. The ability to design and reflect on her own position on the background of various geographical and mental areas enabled her to create a hallucinatory vision of tropical modernity within the paintings, reflecting her inner reference framework for understanding the world.
In the free semiotic game, from the romantic painting of the 19th century, the author assumes the motive of hidden reality. Atmoshpere in Tropiques Nord paintings often contain human figures wrapped in mystical ethereal landscapes of changed aggregate states within which natural elements of air, water, soil, and light are in circular fluidity. On the other hand, exploring the form of the classic legend of the heroic quest within the Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, horsemen in these paintings are in an associative relationship with the bold travels of researchers and their followers, often unknown individuals, unclear contours away from reality.
The key to read the installation of staged tropical manifestations located within the archival structure of museum depots and offices could be similar to the mechanism of the operation of the optical scare – you need to watch them for a while and suddenly you can see them as inverted. Only by long filtration they turn around and reveal their inner structure and their relationships with other imaginary worlds.