ENGRAVEINGS – BLACK ON WHITE

 

The medium of printmakeing I use as the key to discovering principles.

By translating the drawings - spontaneous notes into the material - metal, I create a prototype - matrix. The material I use to make the matrix records the impulses of consciousness and organism which becomes a part of its content. In some matrices drawing predominates, in others  structure predominates. Shape and combination of matrixes are inscribed as the content of the print.

I use black printing ink to make the matrix content readable. The black images imprinted over the already printed black achieve a tactile quality stemming from the structure and color saturation.

Once I am done with a matrix imprint, I write words in designated spaces: HOUSING, MIRROR, LETTER, POSTAMENT, GRAVITATION, GATE…these are some of the names of the prints completing this cycle.

Each image stemming from the order of matrixes represents a sign for a term/category I have given it and each of the pieces represents the process of investigating the principles contained in the process of making that print..

The matrix carries information related to the time interval it was created in, while the arrangement of the matrixes in spaces represents the moment holding all these time intervals. This is how, aided with matrixes, I translate past into the present.

The end result is a black and white scenery.

 

Mihailo Stanisavac, 2009.

 

 

 

                                                                                          MEDITATION ON BLACK

 

It is easy to miss the point in the child’s question ‘why is the sky blue?’ If we address the inquiry to the latest explanation borrowed from the empirical sciences, called Rayleigh Scattering, then we certainly have failed to rise to the occasion. The force of the question is not so much why the sky is blue, but—why should it be any color at all?

 

That the sky turns black at night does not seem as fraught with mystery as its dawning blue. The darkness that creeps through the sky overhead seems a natural consequence of the celestial cycle.

 

In optics, black absorbs the color spectrum, and withholds its brilliant rainbow from our eye. The color black then can be seen as at once objectively constitutive of all colors, and, subjectively devoid of all color. Such recourse in an empirical explanation to the subjective apparatus of observation might make the scientist uncomfortable.

 

But the artist has the great advantage over the scientist because he delights in the elegance of such relations. As the antithesis of color, the meaning of black is dynamic, changing in accordance—or discordance—with the changing colors of the season. But not only its meaning in reflection—our actual perception in vision is also altered. That is to say that there is no experience of pure color without the mediation of our thinking. The optician must first kill color in order to measure and classify it, and only once color has been removed from living circulation can it be copyrighted by lawyers.

 

In art, black would be better asserted as a secret advocate of color. What I means is that black cultivates color by refusing to confine it to the world the painting realizes. Out of the void came the world. Yet, a world by definition is already complete. The new appears within that world, not as from some foreign or alien entity slipping into existence, but as a new configuration of the elements that are already present within the world. That new configuration is a liberation of the material fate of ever-sameness, which is a kind of stasis, or undifferentiated flux, and in this sense, black can be seen as the liberation of color.

 

The generosity and movement of the color black could be explained by an aesthetic principle of optical captivity. According to this principle, what is depicted is also delineated, and its delineations circumscribe what it can be—they partition off what remains possible from what is actual. When black operates according to the principle of captivity, it is the liberator of color: for black is a space of refusal. It refuses color, and in doing so it forces color back into the refuge of nature. In refusing color in art, it restores color to nature. But black is neither scapegoat nor mere placeholder—that is the same thing as saying that pure negation never tells the whole story. Refused by art, color is restored implicitly to nature.

 

Black is the color of ideas. Through the historical convention of using black as the color of text, it has become neutral and transparent—which is quite a feat for any visual phenomenon. The text in books is black because we have made the discovery of abstracting meaning in the act of reading from the concrete words themselves. This was a revolutionary discovery—but it would be a mistake to think that its possibilities have been exhausted.

 

Numbers, numerals, and numerics can bind reflection to a similar complex of problems. The numerical cipher is lent a surface, but that surface is snatched away by the imagination once the work of calculation occurs and the number slips out of its bodily shell into the abyss of thought. What lies between numbers themselves also possesses this double character: numerical infinitude cannot be wholly real until it assumes the burden of concrete numerals.

 

Adorno says that “the ideal of blackness with regard to content is one of the deepest impulses of abstraction.”[1] I take this to mean that while all color, when slathered upon a canvas or piece of paper, is an act of abstraction, black is a more perfected abstraction—that is, it perfects the impulse by standing at its logical conclusion. Another way to put this is that black inhabits the liminal space between color and non-color, between abstraction and concrete assertion. It stands at once at the end of color, as the culmination of all coloring, and at the original threshold of color.

 

The water at Acheron, Homer tells us, is black. These waters separate the living from the dead. Our experience of the color black, whether of texts or mythical rivers, is always shifting from a surface to a void, day to night, movement to stasis, presence to absence.

 

[1] Adorno, Theordor, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 39

 

Keegan Jennings Goodman, 2013.

 

 

 

                                                  Zašto bežite u pustinju? Ja pobegoh od toga, reče Bog svojim igračkama.

 

 

Prostor izujedan znacima, započetim znacima, brojevima, vremenom, brojčanicima, redenicima misli, vreme počinje tim uzurpiranjem mirne površine. Tek nakon toga je ime. Jezik počinje znakom, tim prvim nečim šta god da je.

 

Mihailo pominje šifre koje otključavaju, neki svet iza. Meni padaju na pamet pametne kase, koje uvek menjaju šifru.

 

Put do božanstvenosti je determinisan neuspehom. Nema gde da se stigne, jer već jesmo. Ali nikako da se setimo. Bog u igri ne može sebe da se seti da je zaigran. Neće natrag u sebe. Neće da je sam u pesku. Zašto toliko cenite pustinjake, pa ja pobegoh od toga, reče Bog svojim igračkama.

 

Ali to je ono što ja vidim u Mihailovim šiframa (grafikama). To nagrizeno naličje stvarnosti. Ono mirno što ga gledaju pustinjaci, pa im se javi misao, pa je puste da ode. Mihailovi radovi su isplivavanje misli i njen nestanak. Lažna odgonetka iz lažnog dešifranta mozga.

 

Stojimo pred Mihailovim  radovima kao pred zamrznutim trenutkom, jedna misao počinje, druga je umrla. Jedan neuznemiren svet iza postoji. Ali ništa nije u sukobu. Neki broj se javio i otišao, neka načeta patnja nas okrzne i podseti na… ali i to ode, jer se ne kačimo. Mihailovi radovi su trenutak ne kačenja, pusti ih na miru, voleo bih da čujem da kaže za ta dešavanja pred nama, nemamo mi ništa sa njima.

 

Mihailo analizira taj trenutak nečim što je jezik umetnosti, a to je ono što je van jezika, ono što kad kažemo nije to. Ako bismo da mu se približimo koliko god može, to je Mihailov rad.

 

Kompozicija jednog trenutka, misao broja se tek pojavljuje, ali je udaljena (broj u broju) za nešto prvobitnog prostora, od misli asocijacije na misao od malopre, a to je tu desno dole. Ova strašna rečenica treba da nas podseti da jezik ovde nema ulogu. Mihailov rad se striktno otključava onim iza jezika - našim zaumljem (zaumni jezik pesnika Hlebnjikova). Stojimo pred ogledalom našeg unutrašnjeg monologa koji je stao. Kod nas se odmah nastavio, ali evo vidimo ga, kao onaj znak koji nam igra na mreni oka kad gledamo u svetlost. Jedan podsetnik iz plodove vode. Na ono stanje pre misli, dok smo bili božanstveni.

 

Vladimir Protić, 2013. 

 

 

 

                                                                                         GRAFIKE – crno na belo

 

 

 Medij grafike koristim kao ključ za pronalaženje principa.

 

 Prevodjenjem crteža, spontane beleške, u materijal, pravim prameru - matricu. 

 

Materijal koji koristim za izradu matrice beleži impulse svesti i organizma koji postaju 

 

deo njenog sadržaja. Na nekima od matrica dominira crtez, na nekima struktura. Oblik i 

 

kombinovanje matrica, utiskivanjem, postaje sadržaj grafičkog lista.

 

 Za štampu koristim crnu boju kako bi sadržaj matrice bio što čitljiviji. Crnu boju 

 

sa matrice često otiskujem preko već odštampane crne, čime postižem taktilnost koja 

 

proizilazi iz strukture i zasićenosti bojom. 

 

 Kada završim sa otiskivanjem matrica, na mestima predvidjenim za naslove, 

 

ispisujem reči; KUĆIŠTE, OGLEDALO, PISMO, POSTAMENT, GRAVITACIJA, 

 

KAPIJA, VETRENJAČA, TUNEL... Ovo su neki od naziva grafika koje sačinjavaju ovaj 

 

ciklus. 

 

Svaka od slika koja proizilazi iz rasporeda matrica predstavlja znak za pojam 

 

koji sam joj dodelio i svaki od komada predstavlja neki od principa do kojih sam došao 

 

prateći proces koji grafika sadrži u sebi. 

 

Matrica nosi informacije vezane za vremenski interval u kome je nastala, dok 

 

raspored matrica u prostoru, predstavlja trenutak u kome su sadržani svi ovi vremenski 

 

intervali. Na ovaj način, uz pomoć matrica, prevodim prošlost u sadašnjost. 

 

 Krajnji rezultat je crno beli prizor.

 

 Mihailo Stanisavac