Plinth

It also doesn’t help that the contemporary consumption of images has stopped us from using our eyes. Our fingers get in the way. They grab at the block in our pocket. They twitch, flick, hover and click over an avalanche of content. It’s too much. Do my eyes still have any authority when in front of the art object? I swivel away from the crowd and towards the work.

I am looking at Maja Djordjevic’s paintings, currently on show at Carl Kostyál. The Serbian artist is known for her meticulously applied Microsoft paint aesthetic, a computerised visual language resurrected from the 90’s. The colours are synthetically vibrant. The space is computer screen shallow. The light is flat, and the painted marks emulate a vintage digital squiggle, fondly reminiscent of a more innocent and naïve digital age. Djordjevic employs a character, she refers to as ‘My Girl’ to navigate various adventurous narratives. All figures are open mouthed, their heads back to amplify their voice. They cry out in unison, but what they say, I cannot tell.

My eye skims across the surface, anticipating visual conundrums that provoke personal interpretation. But the picture plane is placid. It is not warped or tested; it is covered. The well-rehearsed painted mark does not evolve beyond the digital language that first inspired Djordjevic. It does not subvert the language of computerised graphics; it merely replicates its hollow medium. Has the artist paused the search in favour of production?

There is no doubt Djordjevic is a talent. Her work can embody a humour and absurdity that confuses and excites. There is a feeling of things having gone a bit awry or got a bit out of hand. There is also a witty description of the weight and depth of forms. An ice cream lands upside down on top of a podium, it drips onto a floor, which is simultaneously a sky seen though the podium and the surface that supports its weight.

Art needs to surprise you into engagement. We rarely know what we are searching for until we start to look. Art should leave us a sensory trail which can move, agitate, engross, or confuse. Love or hate what you see, an opinion formed from the experience of the eye, is satisfying, and hard won. It’s an exclusive conversation between the viewer and artwork which exists in isolation from the persuasive buzz of social media, gallery spiel and fashionable favour. To trust your eye is to have an internal conversation that reconnects us to the physical world, understood through our bodies.

I must confess… I had already exercised my eyes before seeing Djordjevic’s show. I was in the Tate Britain, whirring my retina around Whistler’s Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander from 1872-4.

By the latter half of the 19th century European painting had begun to give more authority to the formal elements of paint. The organisation of colour was suddenly a legitimate title for a work. Whistler famously titled a portrait of his mother, ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1.’ The arrival of photography had further relinquished painting from the obligation to transcribe the subject. Paint had been promoted from impersonator to collaborator. The property of the medium was now of equal importance to what it described.

The discarded robe on the stool in translucent minty green alongside Indian yellow, its painted marks simultaneously the activity of the brush and the materiality of the fabric. The tense white tights in the absorbing black shoes. The rapid stokes that describe their decoration, precisely located by a brisk hand relaying information from the eye. The vertical black line of interior, present to shift focus from the centrally placed figure. There is so much to see.

This can also be true of Djordjevic’s work. In You know what this means right from 2023, included in her recent show at Dio Horia in Athens, we see ‘My Girl’, eyes pinged above her head, clinging on to a rampant pencil, which seems to have momentarily paused after uncontrollably scribbling all over the place. The tip of another pencil is included at the edge of the canvas. Is this also responsible for these squiggly outbursts? Maybe the pencils have been taking it in turns? Why have they not drawn over the paintings hanging on the wall? Why have these pencils gone on the rampage in a gallery, and is ‘our girl’ heroically trying to protect the art on show from possessed drawing implements?! So many questions amongst a variety of painted energies: the limp flowers in the vase, the peaking waves of a boat blustering towards a round pink thing, the frenzied scribbles subdued by the exhausted, exasperated, or perhaps aroused figure. Even in her tight grasp the pencil continues to move in tight circles. One can only imagine it is soon to break free and continue its lead assault. This work, unlike the ones on show at Carl Kostyál, provides you with a lot to consider, not only in the present, but also in the past and future activity of the painting. There are various scenarios for the viewer to nibble away at.

The hyperbolic presentation of art can lull us into an unfounded veneration, accelerated by swipey fingers, so a quick check in with the eye, to see if it is fed and watered, can make us more discerning consumers. There are no wrong answers in art, but I believe our eye should be provoked by questions when scouring across the work. Each response is valid, and if the conclusion is ‘I don’t know why I like it, but I know what I like.’ Great! Just don’t be disappointed if it’s not worth anything in the future, but if you really like it, then you really won’t care.

By Rose Davey