Theoretical Painting by Sonja Briski Uzelac
Sonja Briski Uzelac is a painter who has found a basis for her painting on theoretically formulated conceptualizations of architectural spaces. In other words, Sonja Briski Uzelac is an academic painter who does not envisage painting as a "field" of free expression, but as a field of systematic study of modes of expressions and constructions of "framed scenes" of architectural spaces and their perceptive semantic references. The artist reconstructs (by directing a view) and deconstructs (by delaying via a pictorial script) conceptualized scenes revealing possibilities of positioning safe points of reception as well as laying bare their problematic nature. There is a double bind of knowledge and perception in her work:
(i) via empirical necessity of sensory (visual) confrontation with the painting; and
(ii) via a conceptual game with the codes of different origins – from historical, ideal, to
personal and those present only in traces.
If her paintings are observed as a result of systems of representation in a concrete pictorial space, then each of her paintings can be defined as a pictorial text about architecture or, more precisely, about constructed and expressed field of perception revealing identifications of the view, as well as identifications of the body. A pictorial object is a figurative text in which the visible and the readable are interconnected, although they are also mutually confronted, dislocated and misleading. In case of her series, diptychs or triptychs, the artist builds up the analogy by syntagmatic arrangements of interwoven lexemes which construct synchronically a paradoxical connection between the "spatial" (two-dimensional structuring of the form) and the "textual" (linear interconnection of the paintings in a series that constructs the meaning of a single piece as well as of a macro-text of painting on the basis of primary differences between a piece which precedes and the one which follows). Reading out her painting implies casting a glance on a pictorial group, and defining a text which correlates simultaneously to other pictorial texts from the history of art as well as to other historical texts focusing on composition, perspective, coloring and complex symbolic promises. Her paintings are meant to be "read out". Reading a series of her paintings means establishing the order of differences by detecting visual, i.e. pictorial scenes in specific contexts of understanding the history of the identity of representation. The painting is simultaneously observed by a single glance, and read via several views (by observing/reading the surface of the painting several times), or in other words, our gaze must move from one painting to another in order to link terms, words and pictorial configurations of the painting in a virtual tissue of the text of the painting.
Mimesis (representation) is a semantic and technical media act creating or producing a painting, and relates to an object, a being, a situation or an event anywhere in the world. In a narrower, theoretical sense of the word, the painting is said to express something if that something is its reference (something the work relates to with its material appearance and meanings). The painting, notwithstanding its non-iconic or iconic composition, always represents the other body in relation to the body of the view of the observer and the historical body (figure) of motifs. In other words, Sonja Briski Uzelac does not paint out of cognition, but rather constructs cognition about history of art and history of the problems of perception through each individual painting. Such a painting, in turn, becomes a theoretical index of our perceptive-corporal identity towards a scene which is, by rule, epistemologically rich and epistemologically challenging.
Mimesis of mimesis (representation of representation) is the application of supra-determinations of iconic (mimetic) representations on the representation of other works of art or cultural artifacts. Sonja Briski Uzelac appropriates the procedures of representation of representation on the paintings expressing architectural artifacts. She is not a painter of architecture, but rather a painter of the iconic representation or iconic supra-determinations of stylistic, iconic, archetypical and iconographic representations (coding) of historical examples of understanding architectural objects, which applies both to her paintings "with lines" and "with perspective" alike. Her paintings are, to a certain degree, approximate to Umberto Eco's novels. She appropriates history (historical architecture, the painting showing architectural scenes) not only as a motif or a topos, but also as a mechanism for producing signification, meaning and value. She thematically devises the osmosis of historical concepts by constructing a "code" and "phenomenon" of post-historical modes of painting. This is the reason why her painting is theoretical, because its pictorial-perceptive phenomena produces a "theory" in order to show its ability to represent, project and give. In short, what we have at work is a direct confrontation between the sensory and the conceptual.
Miško Šuvaković