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History of art is an exact science or it appears to have, so far at least, successfully registered and interpreted movements and transformations of creative ideas throughout a variety of periods. It is this phenomenon of certainty of the given periodization and classification of artistic movements through centuries which incites some contemporary artists to play with these "assigned" and ossified guidelines, even more so because they are provided, more than ever before, with an insight into the enormous heritage of all the past centuries and millennia, thanks to the fast and widely spread communication and information network and easy access to extensive art history data bases and literature. Owing to today's highly developed technology of digital recording, reproduction and multiplying, the very act of inventive toying with such heritage is significantly simplified and perfected. Creative approach through the arts of citing, mimicry and transavantgarde characterizes the era of postmodernism as an attempt to reassess the path that art has so far covered, but it is in fact an aspiration to discover new paradigms of creativity and even new interpretations of the entire history. One of our authors who have toyed with the infallibility of art history is Vladimir Ranković from Kragujevac. His cycle of digital prints Guests – Reproductions of Nonexistent Paintings introduces characters from famous 18th and 19th Century paintings to the present, modern and intimate interior settings. Thanks to quality high-resolution digital photography and photo-montage software, that is, by skillfully merging human figures from historical paintings with contemporary interiors, the author succeeds in producing a puzzling effect with his audience, who are unable to discern the original from the reproduction, and finally asks a question of the value of the reproduction (art and reality) as a work of art. This cycle is a consequent sequel to a series of Ranković's art projects and exhibitions in the past few years in which he has dealt with spaces in the sense of surroundings. So in a series of paintings called Spaces he conjures everyday settings, indirectly and in a stylistically refined manner, by assembling fragments of manifold found structures into collages; in installation called Balkan Beds he organizes live meetings and dialogs among artists of Balkan countries, with all the historical burdens they carry with themselves, within cramped spaces made of beds pushed together; only to use silhouettes of anonymous people to project snapshots of interiors of their private surroundings on them in his next series of works called Somebody Else's Spaces. In the series Guests – Reproductions of Nonexistent Paintings, Ranković opens new spaces of artistic discourse, by introducing contents of known figural compositions immortalized in the history of art to the present everyday and common (his own) living space. In such a way, that romantic hero from the painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist by Caspar David Friedrich from 1818 is casting his glance at Kragujevac through fifth floor room's window, Portrait of the Painter Franz Pforr is also set in a recognizable interior of the Kragujevac flat with a cup of coffee, together with one of Ranković's works (from the Somebody Else's Spaces) in the background, the woman from the Ilya Repin's painting is sitting in a leather armchair facing us, for a cozy three-people chat over a cup of coffee, Ingres's fur clad mademoiselle from 1806 finds herself in a room in front of a modernistic curtain with multiple colored stripes, and just as ancient Girl with a Letter by Teodoro Matteini from the end of the 18th Century is sitting in front of a computer and a scanner. The central character of Eugène Delacroix's Girl seated in a Cemetery from 1824 is sitting, mesmerized, in front of Kragujevac roofs and windows, with several silhouettes from the Somebody Else's Spaces in the background, Whistler's White Girl from 1862 is shown entering a room lined with modern art monographes packed on shelves, and so on. The circle of the historical, historicized and modern is thus complete, just as the conceptual abolition of the difference between the times in which these images were made. Ranković abolishes this difference by puzzling the greatest connoisseurs of art history and by offering an insight into the "reproductions" of paintings as he wishes them to be, that is, those which exist only as his Reproductions of Nonexistent Paintings. These are originals of a new art, the one that allows for no time and space barriers, but is limited only by creativity and imagination. |
 ARTIST STATEMENT Every object exists in two worlds. One is the tangible that we know through our senses and another that exists only in our minds. It is in this mental realm where objects take on the properties of metaphor and meaning. These are seldom fixed but exist in a fluid dance where associations are changed as easily as masks at a costume ball. In my work, I play with these complex associations to create rich metaphorical structures. Like the frontispieces of old books, I try to speak volumes through a single image. Although some elements in my work depict ‘real’ things, many objects have never had a tangible physical existence. These elements are modeled completely inside the world of a computer. They are ghosts made of nothing more substantial than numbers; yet they seemingly share space with objects that have both physicality and history. My method of working mimics light itself, one beam at a time, in a process that can take from hours to days to complete and involves literally trillions of calculations. Lenses and mirrors are common in my work. I have removed the lens from the image-making process and placed it within the image itself. Like any depiction, lenses represent a point of view and a narrow focus. What they reveal often overpowers what is excluded by their gaze. Mirrors are a metaphor for art itself as well as the process of self-knowledge and discovery. They are also part of the tricks of mind and eye: smoke and mirrors. The camera was the first machine of depiction, and for a time we believed it to tell only the truth. In the end, perhaps all the images we create share a strange mixture of magic, truth, and illusion. And in this soil sprouts metaphor, which is the source of meaning. BIOGRAPHY Salt Lake artist Edward Bateman received his MFA from the University of Utah and is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History. As a child of what was then called the space age, he was torn between being an artist or a scientist. The computer allowed him to split the difference and in 1983, he first began using computers to create images. By the early 90s, he was working professionally in the field of digital imaging and has for many years taught and lectured on the subject as well as shown his work widely in individual and group shows. His biggest surprise of late is the discovery that the tools that he thought would direct his thinking to the future have led him to contemplate the art of the past. |
