Semsa Gavrankapetanovic

Traces of reinstating the sign Different ways and forms of remembering the past in contemporary art expressions, which are being promoted by many postmodernist strategies, have become customary in personal poetics of certain artists, as an expression of the ‘spirit of time’.

As reflections of possibilities of ‘all that contemporary technique and technical mediators can do for us’, there is a parallel world in creating an art work manually that is deeply aware of cultural relations of the present to the past, trying to draw that relation nearer, in a creative-suggestive way, as much as possible.

There are many cases where precisely creative manner of ‘dialogue with the past’, conditioned by manuel processes reaches to an unconventional creative level, much more personal than many, now already stereotyped technical innovative procedures, which are most often left to the domain of manipulative possibilities of a machine, often identified with creativity. Generally speaking, with some ingenious exceptions, the results of the technical image are becoming more and more unified owing to the fulfilment of the technical perfection in the final status of the painting. The notion of creativity seems to be disappearing in the being of art work, where art itself in its global manifestation is reduced to a level and meaning of mass culture, blotting out the borders of its creative profile, and beings of its creative identity. The technical image, according to common standards of depersonalised creation, becomes more and more conventionally uniformed.

As much as the new technical image/screen projections and prints/ is present almost everywhere in the area of fine art today, there constantly exists the other side of the creative curiosity, the final outcome of which can be seen in various ways of emancipation of matter and materials, as a way of modern creative expression.

In this need for re-examining simple materials, there is a very interesting series of work by Semsa Gavrankapetanovic-Rajnvajn. Her latest series of painting-like signs was done on firm backgrounds. In the form of contemporary palimpsest, memories of the earliest ways of human communication endeavours to the open paths of knowledge and memory in form of letters have been deposited in this series. Since the earliest letters were eternalised in their own backgrounds/carved into hard materials such as rock, bone, clay/, in this series, with chip-board for background, multi-layered embroidery for letter signs was deposited on it. It has become a visible field of metaphors for giving time to space as segments of the details from the past, translated through images from specific letter signs of the old alphabet of Caucasian people, the Etruscan, Cyrillic, Glagolitic alphabet and other legible alphabets which in Semsa’s work became anonymous graphic emancipated space – time interpreters of the meaning past-present. From particular letter signs which were, due to the choice of this artist, devoid of specific meaning as part of words, remaining only on the level of silent graphemes or arabesques, but crammed into certain zones in the visual field – in the form of painting elements, thus from a particular meaning of a letter sign they became a visual metaphor of approaching the function of contemporary graphic-sign elements in graphites on facades and other places, as sign standards of alternative contemporary civilizational code, by which almost every surrounding is recognised today in form of a public message.

This artist has thus turned the context of signs of a sign from the past devoid of meaning into a meaning of denoted non-official language of mass communication, recognised in the form of eternalised messages, similar to those on the walls with the meaning of contemporary graphites.

The very poetic of the visual scene in the series of latest works by this artist, carries its own remarkably found continuity with her earlier graphic formed collages, which also, in the form of a contemporary palimpsest, suggest long-term layers of different materials.

Precisely this temporal component, as a paradigm of meaning ‘lasting in creation’, as a form of extremely prolonged time remembered by human experience, gains in the latest series its specific theme sublimed in variations of ‘searching for the lost time’.

The dark grey shades which connect certain pieces of this series, very suggestively actualize the ‘grey time’ we live in, and in a subtle way remind of recent war happenings in this area. This gives the silent letter signs a resemblance of the demolished walls with fragmented messages, those that, until recently, didn’t have anything to say to anyone except to someone on the wall. Semsa Gavrankapetanovic-Rajnvajn managed, in all that, to keep the integrity of the work, in finding a fine line where it does not become a politicised parole of any kind. This whole series is significant precisely because it established a relation between today’s living sign context of mass and anonymous message, which has been drained from alphabets as the deepest reflections of the long ago conscious human being that believed in the meaning of culture.

The latest series of work by Semsa Gavrankapetanovic-Rajnvajn is a diary of its kind about the recently past events in this region, because they are not remembered as conventional diary entries according to the left data, but by visualised scars of the reality of life described through art in a form of pictures from life with the meaning ‘remains of the remains’. Thus, this series of subtly understood abilities to express real life by means of fine art is, at the same time, introducing a new personal iconography of recognising a sign on relation past – as real, present – as metaphor.

By Kosta Bogdanovic Pressetext

Semsa Gavrankapetanovic (1945), born in Sarajevo, graduated under the tutelage of Prof. Nedeljko Gvozdenovic from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1968, where she also completed postgraduate studies under the tutelage of Prof. Stojan Celic. She lives and works in Herceg Novi and Belgrade.

Semsa Gavrankapetanovic
"Messages from Afar, Traces of Communication"
paintings
The Art Gallery