Duje Jurić

CURSES

18.02. – 01.03. 2015.

Exhibition opening on 18th of February at 7pm

Foto by Mio Vesović

TO CURSE LIKE A PAINTER

A painter can be an avatar of stupidity. Marcel Duchamp famously quipped that it was his intention to disprove the French adage bête comme un peintre by refusing to paint what he saw – unlike the painters who, on that account, deserved to be called stupid. Since cursing is idiomatically associated with sailors and troopers, it is obviously thought of as having something to do with physical action. A painter can be clever by not painting what he sees, but can he curse? Not for the first time, Duje Jurić devises a project that is a rather tall order – for him, as well as for us. The goal, of course, is not so much to provide a solution as to experience the process.

As a socio-cultural phenomenon, cursing can be conceived of in a variety of ways: from a sociological point of view, as the language of the oppressed and the disenfranchised, an act of symbolic violence practiced by those who have been violently deprived of any other form of resistance; psychologically speaking, as a release valve for the urges suppressed by civilization; or put in the etymological perspective, as an index of everything dark, sinister, harmful, and base in human nature. Some, like Montesquieu, see cursing as a document of both the brutality and of the naiveté of a people. It can further be interpreted as a permanent, if not necessarily agreeable, reminder that, while humanity may be advancing in one direction, it is in retreat in a number of others; and that, although the contents may well change, the structure of relations of meaning remains the same. In the words of Tomislav Ladan: Taboo as taboo, even a linguistic one, is less of a passing and more of a permanent thing. In any case, as the privileged example of blasphemy – which is inconceivable but as an inverted prayer, thus confirming what it purports to subvert – clearly shows, cursing is in league with systems of authority and control.

This entails the second important aspect of cursing – its official invisibility. Since this brings cursing within the realm of painting, it is no accident that Jurić chose to paint it precisely in this way: depriving it of visibility, which painting is supposed to be able to provide. Instead, blots of paint (i.e. a painterly means) are used to set locutions apart from an indistinct mass of grey–white letters. One cannot fail to notice that this procedure only produces meaning if one has the command of a given code – when the curse is in a language we do not know, the selected letters remain just as meaningless as the rest. Which points to a third important moment: all communication, cursing included, is culture-bound. Even though its subversive potential can only be discharged in an unexpected context, or else it becomes a verbal gesture like any other, cursing must also be recognisable as such.

As Bakhtin demonstrated, even verbal representation of language is only ever a stylisation, precisely an image of speech, and never speech itself. A painting that not only contains a text but is comprised exclusively of letters, of necessity presents the viewer with an interpretive dilemma. For, as is well-known, although one “reads” a painting from left to right much as one reads a page, one starts to read from the lower and not the upper corner. The interrelations that obtain between points and lines on the plane of a canvass, on which the meaning in painting is predicated, are thus literally at cross-purposes with the semantic aspect of the verbal message, which places the viewer in a situation of interpretive undecidability, demonstrating that the answer to the question posed by all painting – What do we actually see? – is always a function of a further question – How do we look?

Those who cannot be bothered with such queries can always curse the painter.

Tomislav Brlek

Duje Jurić was born  in Rupe 1956. He graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Class of professor Vasilije Jordan, in 1981. Since 1999 he has been working there as an Assistant Professor and later on as an Full Professor at the Department of Painting. He was an associate of the Master Workshop of professors Ljubo Ivančić and Nikola Reiser in the period from 1982 till 1985. During that period he also designs ambiances and takes part in the projects of the theatre group “Kugla glumište“. He has been exhibiting independently since 1984 and to date his works were exhibited at about seventy solo and hundred and fifty group exhibitions at home and abroad. Among the various recognitions, in 2003, he received the Vladimir Nazor Award for annual achievements in the field of painting. He lives and works in Zagreb.

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic Croatia.

Bačva Gallery

Croatian Association of Fine Artists

Trg žrtava fašizma 16, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia 

Working hours:

Wednesday to Friday 11am – 7pm

Saturday and Sunday 10am – 6pm.

Monday, Tuesday and holidays – closed