BIG FANTASY

After years dedicated to radical experimentation, performances, and different conceptualist practices, the late 1980s and 1990s saw a departure in the work of Raša Todosijević and an unexpected turn to “classical” artistic media. The drawings and watercolours he produced during the crisis-ridden 1990s became the main means of expression with which Todosijević provided his commentary on society, drew certain relations, historicised and demythologised public, popular, and political discourses.

Although the professional public and aficionados of contemporary art mostly identify him as an uncompromising conceptualist chiefly associated with non-object art, Todosijević’s artistic habitus is indeed rooted in the practice of painting and drawing, as well as meticulously thought-out references to artists and examples from the history of art.^[1] Running in parallel with his performances and installations, over the years Todosijević has produced a large number of drawings, paintings, and watercolors, not as the result of a secondary activity but of a disciplined artistic practice involving a commitment to the visual as a means of expression in its own right, as well as to visual thinking as a mode of studious reflection and penetrating analyses of his own moods, fears, and hopes in the context of the ruling social reality. In these works, not only does Raša come across as a draughtsman who easily allows his luscious colors to prevail over lines and forms, fully using their aesthetic effect, delicate and intense at once, but also a world emerges that is self-ironic in terms of its own practice. At the same time, Todosijević is also critical regarding the social circumstances, institutional practice, and system of art, which has elevated the “dematerialisation of the artistic object” to the level of a new dogma, a priori dismissing every traditional artistic procedure and “techne” as obsolete. In his drawing we can see a lot of different things: symbols of bankrupt ideologies, sexual fantasies, psychological, bodily actualisations of the artist, self-ironic and self-critical re-examining of the artist-genius and his status, providing a sharp, “clinical” observation of the social condition.

As an artist with a penchant for strategies of demystification, in this series of drawings and watercolors Raša also indirectly touches on interpretative models in art. The nature of symbols and representations changes depending on what we project onto them, which is why they are not strictly defined for Todosijević, but open to various interpretations. Like many other works from the 1990s, these exemplify the artist’s reflections on the topic of the volatility of meaning and use of symbols, as well as their contingencies brought about by changing historical circumstances. They resist classical interpretation; indeed, they are conceptualised as a sort of resistance to the system of art and its need to determine, classify, and “explain” everyone and everything. Whether it is a menorah, five-pointed star, or swastika, Todosijević’s usage is thoroughly critical and penetrates deeply into the process of shedding personal for the sake of acquiring a common identity, by participating in collective rituals, mass events, which have their counterparts in past and more recent socio-political developments alike.

Beside drawings and collages, this exhibit will also feature cult, seldom exhibited collages made in the mid-1970s, which marked the beginning of a practice running in parallel with Todosijević’s “frequent” conceptualist works and served as a sort of overture to his subsequent figural phase in the 1990s. In these works, resorting to strategies from Neo-Dada and Surrealism, Todosijević combined images with text, providing a critical commentary on the social status of art, its institutions and main protagonists, all the while maintaining a self-ironic distance to it.

These drawings and watercolors, singled out and observed as a whole, shed a new light on Todosijević’s career, presenting him as an uomo universale, an artist capable of “surviving” in any situation and any kind of system.

In one of his statements, Todosijević insisted that he is not a symbolist artist, but one who uses familiar symbols and produces arrangements out of fake symbolism.^[2] The symbolism present in his drawings and watercolors is deliberately degraded, devoid of metaphysical pretensions, used intentionally as a cutting edge that, in addition to deformed anthropomorphic shapes and texts that often feature certain autobiographical elements, contains a wealth of messages. Powerful and subtle and disturbing at once, the aesthetic of Todosijević’s watercolors provokes the beholder, irritates her, and leaves her confused. Harbouring an inner contradiction – tragedy and humor, beauty and banality – this series of watercolors and drawings provides an ironic view of the entire aspect of humanism, which is today in a state of crisis perhaps more than ever before.

Saša Janjić

[1] Works inspired by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Courbet’s famous painting The Painter’s Studio.

[2] My thanks to Raša Todosijević, MCAB 2002.