In the title of Jelena Jelača’s exhibition “Parallel Reality”, the word reality suggests that all the elements are founded in the author’s real personal experience. At the same time, they make a compact hermetic system based on the laws established by the will of the artist and provide form to an autonomous artistic reality. However fantastic the people and events presented in Jelena Jelača’s paintings may seem to us, her work is not related to surrealism. Rather, her paintings are characterized by a lived and deeply thought out experience of reality which she transforms in the artistic process to achieve an engaged contemporary concept. The artist questions the position of the individual in relation to society, the (re)construction of identity, gender relations, limits of self-knowledge and role of spirituality. The classic artistic medium – figurative easel painting in an authentic way articulates and creates a new platform for contemporary artistic expression.
The author’s portraits of persons close to her, on a silver background, make up the largest portion of the exhibition. The precise definition of characters and gift for observing specificities are a reflection of the artist’s intelligent and intuitive nature. The portraits have been consciously chosen and the fact that they have been chosen makes them iconic in themselves. If a person is by itself not an icon, it becomes one in the eyes and work of the artist. Sometimes this means that through them the artist is presenting a part of herself. In this way, the artist’s self-portrait is a place of intersection where she searches for the appropriate – closest to the ideal, personal state, which in the process of painting changes together with the painting. This is supported by a video work recording phases in the process of creation.
In order to create a parallel reality, it is necessary to remove oneself from the everyday, to look within, and so the entire exhibition was created in the spirit of personal but also collective transformation.
Jelača uses portraits as a motive that expresses deeper transcendental and socially engaged messages. As an artistic genre in history, the portrait emerges primarily as an expression of status and the symbolic, and much later, in realism and expressionism, becomes a means for depicting the character and psycho-emotional profile of the person portrayed. By engaging immediately with the observer through playing with the archetypal mythological and fairytale-like depiction of heroes and heroines, this fantastic silver suite has the role of language symbols using which it is possible to read a series of messages. Victim, triumph, control, adjustment, resistance, cunning, disguise are the principles illustrated here. Although founded in reality, they are more visions than representations, and thus communicate in a firm correlation with the author’s self-portrait. At the same time, they contribute to the performative nature of the exhibition, which relies on transcendence and faith in the strength of man’s ability to (re)create himself through internal struggle and striving towards an ideal.
This closed but also communicative kingdom is led by a feminist political program that problematizes gender-related divisions of roles and glorifies individuality – the right of each individual to be free and realize itself, and confront the dominant system of values of forced patriarchy.
In a world where a woman’s most significant role is still attributed to motherhood, her sexuality becomes a resource mercilessly exploited by the consumer society, and the artist’s self-portrait in a long red dress (the color of blood, menstruation, rulers) with a pig (innocent victim) in her lap draws attention to this problem and underlines the importance of the female principle. The motive of the burqa, a symbol of restricting individuality, appears in several places. The natural flow and inevitability of the basic life processes are illustrated by images of pigs and children, giving an earthly frame to the exhibit as a whole.
Jelena Jelača’s stay in a parallel reality is a unique experience for the observer, which allows insight into some of the important questions raised by the author in this exhibition.
We are eagerly waiting for a sequel.
Ksenija Marinkovic, Art Historian
