BOGDAN BORČIĆ - GRAFIKE/ PRINTS
retrospektivna razstava/ retrospective
katalog/ catalogue

jernej kožar
BOGDAN BORČIĆ: PRINTS
(ON REALISM, ABSTRACTION AND IMAGE READING)

Since the first post war years till today we can follow a reduction of the motif to a monochromatic surface in Borčić's graphic opus - in the mid eighties - and then back to colour surface, which tends again to win recognition with traditional ways of significance. From the black surface, where the image is cleaned off all additional meanings (or includes the most of  them) regarding the contents as well as the form, the course of the artist’s creation changes. A new symbolic enters the creation: the symbolic of the studio, the artist’s workroom. The iconography of the studio is very rich: we can interpret it as the artist’s self-portrait, as microcosm is subtly telling us about the outside world, although being - at least it seems so - completely isolated from it. In the  formal sense when we derive from minimalism as the limit point of the artist’s creation, the picture of the studio presents indulgence, since formal elements which enter the image are able to denote individual objects - for instance the studio’s ground plan.

Thinking about the development of Borčić’s image a map can be helpful : the image changes as the earth’s surface does according to different projections and measurements. His first maps represent the artist himself, boats, doors, recognizable elements of the everyday world around. The scale of these maps is 1:10, 1:100 what enables a quite simple recognition of the motif. Till the beginning of the nineties Borčić’s prints near the zero point of space and time and when achieving the state of singularity, the destination turns - the scale has changed.

In the fifties Borčić’s attention is directed on to the sea: the boat, the mollusc shell. Both motifs - the boat and the shell - have a strong symbolic connotation, a rich iconographic tradition. The boat as one of the means of transportation on water (raft, ship) symbolizes the transfer from this word into another one: it is Charon, the ferryman of the dead in Hades, who carries their spirits across the underworld rivers - the passage between the world of alive into the world of dead. The boat is laden with a lot of symbolic meanings and later disappears completely out of the motif repertory. Somehow less that fact concerns the shell itself, still the meaning of the shell is deeper and more important in fine arts: Botticelli’s birth of Venus - the birth and the goddess of love - the birth of the goddess of love.

In the sixties Borčić concentrates on maritime motifs: boats, fishermen, fishing nets. Towards the end of this decade signs begin to appear (end of the seventies) out of which he’s later going to work up a complete cycle as well as motifs that already include the anticipation of popart influence :  "Pair", "Artist with Model", "Experiment", "Dark Print", "Can of  Fish",...
In the seventies Borčić mainly concentrates himself on the mollusc shell. The shaping of the shell is completely rational somehow being in the spirit of the renaissance artist as scientist. Still this impression can only be a surface reflection of his main interest - the procedure of the printing process: etching, aquatint, dry point. His perfect mastery of the mentioned graphic techniques can be observed on the surface as well as in the image. The picture is filled with elements of the geometrical language: graphs, lines, shapes ... It’s not coincidental that Borčić leans on the geometrical - scientific language for that language is far more exact as that of the painting and printing one. The number of signs is limited and they are all precisely defined. The shell is presented from all possible sides, not the smallest detail - this unusual wound form - is missing. As already said the mollusc shell has an extraordinary symbolic impact - in this case its outer structure, curved like a spiral and the spiral has undoubtedly been one of the basic human symbols.

In the next phase the shell doesn’t represent the central motif of his research any more, it changes namely to a decorative element, to the background. In this place there are dots that replace the shells, or expressed geographically, the scale changes. The artist’s sight penetrates deeper and deeper, the motif is being enlarged leaving the shell solely as a point on  the white or black background. As if the artist’s view had  reached the very essence of the shell, its interior, its soul and nothing has remained from the shell what couldn’t have been left over of any other existing living being. Left over have only been the fundamental principles that determine the form in space and can so easily be represented just in the fine arts.
In the following phase when the scale diminishes again he passes over to the subatomic stage, to the stage of elementary pieces of nature; only emptiness remains, a great emptiness among individual particles that travel with  the swiftness of light. On this stage the human eye is not able to distinguish  between  infinite small and infinite big any more - this state is called  singularity. Here unchecked physical laws govern, quantum forces and dimensions incomprehensible to the human being because they are not a part of our world. The singularity is represented on black pictures that are namely rarely completely black, usually the black is always in active relation to white or a brighter colour.  These works are called "Black Square", "Black Fields With Black Edge", "Theme: Quadrant", "Black Square On Black Field", ... titles only describe the state of the image. However the picture is never completely black,  entirely without light, there is always a thin bright strip - the horizon of the event. The other side represented by the white field exists and this other side is seen in the never entirely black picture. There is a future but existing on the other side only.

The phase of the black field research, of singularity (represented only as a black field) lasted throughout the eighties and indented into the nineties. We can experience its conclusion on pictures (acrylic on canvas) in the Meander series, that represent a constancy in Borčić’s opus - the development of the next phase of graphic creativity is nearly always strictly shown in his painting. The following phase is announced by the pictures. This change finally takes place with the "Studio" series; where the black field is deconstructed in  pieces we break the singularity point and step out of a world without future into a world without past. The singularity disappears and the black field wins its contents.

Borčić’s prints offer us a wonderful insight into the process of  creating an abstract picture. The shell on it  changes into a dot through intermediate stages. The shell multiplies, small  shells cover the whole surface of the picture, the shell is hidden behind other elements ... The rhythm of relations of  artistic picture elements is common to all the stages of the shell’s decay. The transformation of the dot continues till there is only a line left on the picture, a black and a white field - and so an abstract picture comes into existence. The precisely defined shell changes into a shell, into more shells and in this way the shell becomes a dot (more shells become dots). Out of these dots a surface develops, a  black surface that continues to live on the surface of the picture  keeping up the dialogue with the white, brighter surface.
We can understand the described process of the motif reduction to elementary signs of the graphic language  through the prism of  Borčić’s interest for printmaking techniques. It seems as if he had completely been addicted to them somewhere in the mid seventies, as if he had entirely concentrated himself on the procedure of motif creation. In this sense we can understand the rather quick motif reduction, for instance of a shell, onto a monochrome surface - what has happened in just about a decade. Thus we can see that the artist’s stressed interest for the printmaking technique represents the condition for the monochrome print creation and  according to that fact the motif reduction into its basic component parts enables a faster working process and more precisely set effects.  Simultaneously with the increased interest for the technique in the seventies, Borčić was engaged in the artistic motif research as well: what it is determined by, its orientation, the position in space, the relation to other objects, component parts of the surface or is it the space, the colour ...

translated by E. K.