The doors

Metka Kavčič Bogdan Borčić

 

 

Keys that open the doors to memory snippets

At first glance the objectivised images with the motifs of doors by Bogdan Borčić and Metka Kavčič escape the standard art history taxonomy. Through the joint exhibition the unusual 'picto-sculptures' that were created independently in the painter's atelier in Slovenj Gardec and the sculptress's workshop in Maribor seemingly overcome the notion of the everyday differentiation of art into paintings and sculptures. In the reciprocal flirtation they escape this dichotomy and merge into one, with which they prove that in the post-modernist times such divisions are a thing of the past, for they do not reflect the actual state of contemporary creativity, which freely uses and combines any means of expression. At the same this creativity adapts numerous new, non-traditional media and non-artistic concepts through which it enters the previously unthought-of fields of artistic creation.
With a more exact analysis of the painting assemblies, woven into a net of associated realistic objects and included into the basic structural frame (that is undoubtedly, even though non-functionally linked to the more or less pictorial surface that is in everyday life drawn on the walls by the door) it appears that Borčić's art, regardless of the emphasised hapticism and objective links to the clear associative form does not move away from his basic, 'infected' with the idea of high modernism painting at which the painting field is in the first line a training course for an extremely cultivated and rich art game. To the same extent the 'doors' by Matka Kavčič address (through sculpture) the development of the form within a space that is limited with the dimensions of the found object and then flattened and more or less clearly defined only when viewed from one side, even though it is clearly felt in all three of its dimensions. Even with his newest, for some surprising works, Borčić does not stray from the route shown by the painting of the so-called formalistic abstraction from the 1950s and 60s onwards. This abstraction continued with its modernistic search of the form without pictorial depth and compositional complexity that eventually lead to a flattened and levelled painting surface. Even in his most radical minimalist paintings - except maybe in the variations on a certain theme - Borčić has never truthfully abandoned the associative links to the direct initiatives from the environment. He always purposefully softened the solipsistic character of his abstract images with small, sometimes almost invisible or camouflaged interventions, mostly in the form of signs that could be understood only by him, symbols of very personal, intimate stories, spices added to the seemingly impersonal and empty abstractions. And once we can follow these tiny, concealed hints, the consistency of the entire opus reveals itself. We can notice its bottomless ingenuity and after more than fifty years of unbroken work oriented into researching art mysteries the artist still has undiminished creative power. This power has always drawn on the effects of 'objectivised' colours, most directly in the final examples of an individual idea when merely the painting remained. Once rid of all unnecessary details the painting became merely a naked, undisputable and undistorted visual sensation. The story of Borčić's painting is thus first of all a story of colour. The chromatic density remained the suggestive power of his newest images, even though its sublime self-sufficiency was supplemented by the effects of bodily collages of non-painting materials, while the 'spaceless' painting field condensed into its haptic body. This conditional 'body presence' slowly drops the painting from the heights of the raised transcendence of the colour effect and moves it to the here and now, into the concrete world where it touches life. Previously hard to read, into the smooth surface of the painting unobtrusively stamped signs are now materialised into recognisable objects which (with their concreteness) open the image to contexts and interpretations and the specific language of 'pure' art is filled with meanings. Borčić accepts the chosen motif of the doors as a ready-made image, but he treats is as a material, an available object with a picturesque presence, at which the context of the real ambient and its symbolic status has merely a secondary meaning. The individual elements of the doors represent the 'sensory material', which in the chosen format of the painting canvass and in the frames of the clearly lined structure of the graspable art coordinates generates the reconstruction of the appearance of the realistic impression. Borčić is at his most brilliant when he shows himself as an extremely subtle observer of realistic situations and as a unsurpassable master of their transformation into artworks that spring to life in their own internally and artistically organised world. The found or selected object that finds itself on the surface of the painting is different from the object as it was when it was alienated from its 'natural' habitat - when Borčić uses it he is fully aware that he has placed it in the space of art 'fiction'. In the compositional sense he subdues individual elements to the 'model' and finally he gives his work a title that leads towards the source, a title that is clearly recognisable and equipped with the aura of phenomenological uniqueness and objective non repeatability.
The approach of Metka Kavčič is almost diametrically opposite to Borčić's approach. The doors that she uses for starting points of her art interventions retain its functional context all the way to the end. With the stories from 'before' they create a relaxed associative construction of the sculptural objects, which are at the end underlined by humorous titles. The fascination with relics, abandoned details of the formally useful, transformed nature and the unusual fascination with the 'wrecked civilisational material' (as once stated by Emerik Bernard) is most likely connected to her work as a conservationist, for the 'sensory material' that appears in the function of the filling of the door wings, is once more made mostly out of found objects. Each one of them contributes its story to the whole, which through the transferral into art finds itself at the point where it becomes a connection between the outside nature, the subjective perception and the unconscious. These obscure objects draw the view and attention, because they carve holes into the structure of the usual cognition and understanding. When they become models of the artistic creative process they - as the Lacanian 'sujet troue' (subject full of gaps) - fill with contents that fills the gaps. The found objects, regardless of their transformation that Metka Kavčič performs with great skill in virtually all sculpting processes in wood, metal profile and tin working, as well as working with unusual sculpting materials and modelling, assembling into an unusual fictional and functional space of the haptic structure, which in opposition to Borčić's doors-screens transparently let through the view into the negative space behind the doors, include the interpretational dimensions that allow the viewer a free reading of the traces and fragments from the 'sediments' and alluvial meanings of their former roles.
The doors can be a metaphor for the perception of the world, for they protect their non-understandable mysteries and final truths while at the same time invite us to curiously reopen them or at least try to decipher a small piece of their mystery. However, sometimes the eye of the creator and the viewer stops in the foyer of the purgatory of everyday life, where small everyday things can appear equally important as the great truths, especially if they are filled with an honest personal experience, embedded into the jamb of the doors of transition that we form ourselves. for us and for the one who feels the world as we see it along our path everyday and we find in art which has this fantastic characteristic that it assembles the magical mosaic of snippets that are maybe only hints that knock on the doors of our capability of sensory perception. also in conditions of contemporary life, when real reality was substituted by virtual reality. Even though they are masterpieces of the metier control of the matter and the lively formation of picturesque, into the richness of various textures, dunked art stories, the doors by Metka Kavčič and their seeming functionality are post-modernist simulacra that wittily and with chameleonic skill escape the drift between the allusion of usefulness and the persiflage of everyday life.
On the other hand Bogdan Borčić builds his own story always anew, with undiminished passion. The chosen objects that are lined on his doors are not there by chance. Their narration is exclusive and this is why in the same moment as they were ripped from their organic environment, they become fetishes of a very personal story and the tools of constant rummage, research and analysis. Borčić's doors seem to be an impenetrable shutter that constantly eludes something behind, something that remains hidden, invisible, unnoticed and absent. It is like the lid of Pandora's Box that is preserving the memory, even though it is merely a snippet of the ancient memory of the childhood years of the sun bathed summers with the taste of salt, a reminiscence of a travelling experience or the traumatic pain of the war. The associative net of collaged objects on the surface of unusual chests of a very personal testament is only seemingly the key that fits the keyhole of these doors. The 'loquaciousity' of the structural elements of the image is deceitful in the same way as the endless flow of descriptions of Proust's search for lost time: truthfully it is there just so that it through real and unreachable contents weaves a hardly noticeable membrane that separates the subjective memory from life. which pulls the fiction of art from the passing moments of everyday banality, never to be caught again. The fatal lid of Pandora's box opens only with one key painting (at this exhibition) by Borčić: the triptych with Komiža reveals its internal life, which with the all encompassing blueness catches the all encompassing childhood memory of the undistinguishable azure line, where the sea and sky touch and where the impulse that fatally denotes the entire imposing opus of Bogdan Borčić is hidden.  
The image of closed doors is as silent poetry that whispers its words only to its creator.

Marko Košan