Mexico
The time has come for “interesting geography” and great journeys (real or fictional, it doesn’t matter)…
- Tourists guides that invite you to faraway, exotic countries: the good times and fun are guaranteed, getting to know the local traditions, you can enjoy the national cuisine…
- Illustrations from first-level language course textbooks: what is doing the person A on this picture? And persons B and C? I want to have dinner… Where can I find nearest hotel?
- Still frames from cartoons about adventures of fearless hombres: press play underneath the picture and the cartoon will continue…
In a humorous way the artist is re-using, the raw, most common clichés connected to Mexico (fiesta, corrida, senoritas, cactuses, Guadalajara, Acapulco…) by placing them in a new context – the context of a painting. The existing stereotypes represent easy-for-use, attractively packed mix of fictional and factual that is aiming for instantaneous effect. All of this makes them the most efficient and the most economic means for travel to Other (and ever so desired) world. For these reasons (velocity, lightness, efficiency) the artist, whose background is rooted in popular and subcultural, chooses stereotype as a starting point of her own escapism. She rejects the marginal, degrading status of genre-scene and furthermore, she restores its artwork and galleristic status using well thought, pop-art expression.
The paintings are characterized by emphasized, worm colors and bright light (still another common representational tool when we deal with Mexico, translated to visual language). The motives are over stylized, over designed, sometimes “spiced up” with inscriptions, that have besides the verbal considerable ironic value (the same goes for super-modern billboards and advertising pages who are always inviting its public to consume things).
Numerous, lovely details, exept their formal function in active deconstruction of painted scenes, can also act as individual, anecdote-like unites. The perspective is often deformed, because of simulation of “birds-view” characteristic for film-camera style. Buildings, looking like picturesque cardboard scenery of fantastic, “old” films or theatre pieces, constitute right mis-en-scene for joyous city life that is happening in front of us.
These paintings are sharing the common artistic syntax and clear articulation that are addressing the pure pleasure of gaze. The choice of widely known motives, and common Mexican emblems, taken mostly from films, is enjoyment of a viewer. Jelena Jelaca’s poetics, built on model of popular culture and demystification of work of art, is at its best precisely in paintings dedicated to Mexico.
Ljiljana Karadzic