Nikola Kolja Božović
People love their drugs, porcelain, 23x30x22cm
Stay strong in rapid message exchange
Nikola Kolja Bozovic knows what he is doing and how it is possible to help good old painting to once again go through an existential crisis in the era of electronic media. He also knows what pleases an audience, most of all an audience brought up on mass media messages, but above all knows what their fears are. He perfectly understands the hidden desires of this heterogeneous public and is ready to please them in a luxurious and gallant way.
His artistic work focuses on shaping a series of pictures rather than individual pieces of art. This bears special significance because, in a way, it brings an easel painting closer to other forms of visual narratives, such as comic strips, films or videos. For Kolja Bozovic a painting is neither a fetish nor an object of infinite respect, but an action field. It can even be a boxing ring in which, despite all conventions, any intervention is allowed, such as blending opposite materials and confronting visual and textual messages. It is an exciting and dynamic meeting place of well crafted pieces of pure painting and plotter-printed kitsch illustrations pasted on large-format collages in the series themed "Invasion". The author conscientiously stresses constant tension between hand-coloured segments and mechanically reproduced rasters, creating multimedia visual language. He avoids using classic artistic means to bypass discontinuity between visual and textual sphere, allowing the two levels of representation to function autonomously on the multilayered painting. However, the line between the visual and textual levels of narration is far less constituent to the hybrid structure of Bozovic's work than the sharp cut which leaves a wide open gap between the manual and technical, reproductive levels.
The "cut" and "paste" method produces dramatic effects in Bozovic's combined paintings every time the moves of the brush confronts the printed rasters. The moves of the brush represent the individual and manual; they almost equal an intimate diary. In painting, therefore, movement of the brush has the value of authentic handwriting, while a fragment of a digital printing represents the impersonal, the mechanical, the technological. This essential contradiction has not shaken the foundations of and led to confusion in visual narration that binds the paintings together in the rounded series. The "Invasion" has not slipped in the context of advertising, which has adopted various methods of combining, only because in creating such blended paintings Bozovic does not yield to playing with different materials for the sake of the "l'art pour l'art" satisfaction or trivial experimentation. He organises juxtapositions in a disciplined and concentrated manner and leaves clearly visible cuts between the manual and technical levels of his paintings. The clash between the traditional, painted level and the new, digital print, opens, in a way, two opposed levels of reality in paintings, but a perceptive abyss as well.
Kolja Bozovic demonstratively rejects the language of confessional intimate painting and with commitment speaks about taboos and fascinations of a man living in an urban ambience, forced to find his way through a jungle of symbols and coded messages. He renounces the preset standards of art history. On the other hand, he is not as consistent in using the experiences of the avant-garde movements, from Cubism to Dadaism to Surrealism, either. Bozovic builds the structure of multiple painting narration by aggressively adopting various messages and representations of media articulated space and pop culture. In his combined paintings, a contemporary observes will not find a place for rest or solace in the timeless ideal representation of order; for instead of offering the observer esthetic pleasure of perception, these painting will push him back in the environment of information manipulation. The sharp sense of probing limits and renouncing conventions of the genre and media are typical of the hybrid structure of paintings in the "Invasion" series. Bozovic has conscientiously chosen the position of an artist who walks the thin line between commercial and elitist practice, the avant-garde and kitsch approach, the visual and textual, the authentic and multiple, the original and copy. Such controlled chaos in his paintings does not disintegrate their blended structure. On the contrary, it opens the structure towards new spaces of communication and a positive energy exchange in the context of massive distribution of electronic information.
Milanka Todic