THE CORE OF EXPERIENCE

The Paintings of Predrag Popara as invocations/Evocations of ‘The Burning Island’

The paintings of the series entitled The Burning Island represents an intense personal
attempt to attune to and express an aesthetic and thematic disjuncture. Predrag Popara’s
fluency in the fragmentation of optical and colourful consistencies produces a re-
emergence of hidden structures. It comprises traces of brush-stroke, and the drip and
density of colour areas, as well as performative acts transmitting gestural lines and
textural inventories. THowever, the method was the signature style, however, of that
exploration of the significant post-war events that constituted life’s utter devastation.
Many of the goals of late modernist painting can be located inside the lost realm of
those bygone times, when the painter’s attitude toward the liberating powers of the media
made a strong contribution to Art’s grasp of everyday events. These well-known, now
historical representational practices are engaged quite differently in the aftermath issues
of painting as a contemporary visual art phenomenon, especially with the turbulences and
shattering of image-making that date from the beginning of this century. There can be
no doubt, moreoverhowever, that the implosive powers of The Burning Island series are
more markedly different in view of the autonomy of their maker’s personal experience.
These paintings were composed over time, and premiered in public in 2017,
revealingexposing a diversely layered testimony to our contemporary world. The title
metaphor in the title evokes a subsumed repertoire of forms, which are somehow beyond
the historical cases and examples of non-representational painting. Its existential
importance and durability within the context of the socio-economic transition represents a
successive/successful and idiomatic personal initiative. The Burning Island projects a
sense of the highest alert - and of catastrophe. TheSuch argument of Predrag Popara’s
artworks precedes an arbitrary movement in which arethat immerseds a painter’sly hints
and a suggestion of matter in a state of swift and incandescent change. His created
imageries, varying in their fractions/fractures and intensities, are no longer engaged in
the liberating forms of Late Modernism.
His habitual realm of vast and intensivee painterly work are paradigmatic of the notion of
post-truth that has struck at both global culture and solitary individual ways of
understanding the circulating anxieties of current affairs. These social changes lead to the
reliable thesis that cultural and political consumption, as well as postmodernist
fragments, are proof of the survival within these processes of a new “liquid modernity”
and pattern of fluidity in artworks.* (PowerfulInfluential evidence is provided by Prof.
Zigmunt Bauman’s notion of “Liquid Modernity”. Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity
Press, Cambridge 2000.)
This distance between the individual’s stance and the change in global societies offers an
intuitive comprehension of the whole, as well as of the technological and living systems
of functioning in this latter age of advanced cognitive sciences and social discrepancies.
The peripheries of theose systems and their functioning rely upon a state of affairs
presenting challenges of the utmost gravity: unrealized truthfulness/a merely latent
truthfulness/repressed truth and the multiple banalities of myriads of globally produced
images, sprawled over every second of the day.. These are mere incidents and random
gestures, manifestations of the changes of a fluid culture. The consequences of the
conditions and insecurities of contemporary life remain as mere modes of survival. The
current dystopian overproductive aftermath flows from the concluding effects of
modernist beliefs. Notions of social and personal perceptual aims are interwoven with the
unusual vitalism of which each of these colourful tableaux offers examples, regardless of
format. The sense of the bursting forth and intercreation of suggested and possible forms
triggers Popara’s personal reflections on contemporary art - a specifically time-based art
-, and our present time.
It is obvious that the old millenial medium of a fixed composed image made on a flat
surface, whether resembling the visible world or combining mere planes, shapes and
depictions, is being challenged on a new pathway of densely accumulated brush-strokes.
The act of making an artwork in the sense of its wide and trembling possibilities seems to
accommodate a lively fluidity through passages from one state or from one sequence to
the next. This is not an attempt to emulate any of the time-based arts, but above all an
awareness of the increased sense of contemporary networks that are creating a seedbed
for new emotional and human transferences in the arts.
These changing conditions begun to strike the contemporary artworld at the close of the
C20th, century, and were emphasized recently in the influential essay Painting Beside
Itself* (David Joselit, Painting Beside Itself in: October, no.130 /Fall 2009 The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA. p.125-134.). These paintings manifest by means of different
tactics and, to a certain extent, by an awareness that permeates our divided attention and
the temporal disconnection symptomatic of digital time, as being a time that is either
here or there/neither here nor there/both here and there. That is why the painting of such
a new order of procedure and distinguished execution is so considerable an achievement.
It freezes detail and particular content, setting it apart from a time-based video or loop
of moving images. Occurring, however, within individual associative landmarks offrom
real world events or personal recollections of standard pictorialities, the series The
Burning Island is based purely on gestures and layers of colour as cumulative timbres in
the visualising of fundamental frequencies. This is in combination with astrally driven
performative acts whose overall incidents carry the charge of liberated energies at the
service of different ways of image-making, even those from the age of primal, absolutely
bold individual dealings with the outer world.
Testimonies to beliefs, customs and specific approaches towards the creative process are
somehow apparent in the liberating energies of landmark modernist artists. Repetition as
a painter’s practice is often discussed in relation to changing social conditions*. (Ssome
of the more developed explanations can be found in the chapter Paris from Manet to
Miró by David W. Galenson, Painting Outside the Lines, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA
and London, UK 2001. 75-111.) These new painting units recall repetitive, adventurous
and intensive interventions from inside the metaphor of an detached reflection on daily
contemporarymundane issues such as immigration, longing and displacement, as well as
the existential turbulence of relations within apparently hidden structures.
The most sensual of reactions/ reactions to colours/interactions between colours can be
seen to evoke a pattern of scriptic/calligraphic movement from brown, lilac and pink to
yellow and silver-grey. Creating an illusion of plasticity throughout the depiction of
tubes, or of some kinds of organic containers, the painter strives against the entire
function of fluidity. These generated flows of matter or substance in most of Popara’s
paintings are the conditions that we have inherited in the general ethos of contemporary
survival. Zigmunt Bauman’s notion of the fluidity of relations, values and represented
materiality, as well as of pleasures and delights, seems to lead to the only method that
painters can provide: the fulfillment of illusionary powers within the image launched
and carried forward in the process of the application of the paint. Symbolic gestures are
somehow presented through discontinuous passages, or labels ‘in abstracto’. These
rhythmic events, in creating such colourful passages, are now seen giving back to the
beholder the traces of performative acts (timings, spacings or even faraway occurrences
in some non-real micro-universe). Questions arise within the treatments of various
examples. A cluster of active stimuli inside a canvas render a fleeting frenzy, or a
discovery of an intuitive objecthood, or a shade of possible associative figuration. Here,
colour demarcations create an overlayering purple threshold. There, recognisable and
surface brush-strokes present a running optical commentary on the slippage from an
imagined but unreachable wholeness of vision. This is evident in many of the paintings
within the series. Perhaps, such “purple haze” layers are a contribution to the radial
organisation of most of the concentrated actions within the painter’s approach. The
intersection of layers of colour can be seen merging with haunting parallax effects. They
involve the blinding lights of nature’s omnipresent permutations constrained to the
patterns of the painter’s own intense movements.
Gestural directions strive towards shapes and contours of organisms in a state of defiance
or struggle. In global affairs, and within reliable digital systems, there are ongoing
discomforts and disorientations. They are emerge from environmental erosions,
pollution, urban miseries and technologies on the verge of running amok.
Method and dynamism are central to Popara’s painting series and its significant
einvocations of the world. ThisIt recalls the Rancière’s perceptivethoughtful positioning
of artistic sensibilities:
‘The cult of art presupposes a revalorization of the abilities attached to/connected with
the very idea of work. However, this idea is less the discovery of the essence of human
activity than a recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the rela-
tionship
between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying.’ * (The Politics of Aesthetics:
The Distribution of the Sensible, Jacques Rancière - Transl. by Gabriel Rockhill, Contin-
uum International Publishing Group, London and New York 2006, 45.)

The flux of such image-making faces the total absence of concern inside the wounded
and intermeshing messed-up societies undergoing the socio-economic changes of the
C21st ,century in the repetitive and weary ubiquity of their arresteded opportunities.
The imaginative leaps of The Burning Island’s shattering dynamics manifest in Predrag
Popara’s paintings come in different formats, and remind us that the accidents of the
exploitation of the outer world can be seen as proof both of the perils afflicting the
environment and of the outside powers that strike at us. The torrents of information we
are exposed to concerning threats to Nature and Society constitute the prima materia of
this painting. Its achievement is to present us with a reconciling leap from the vast and
exhausting world we all share into our private inner world.

Nikola Suica