Exhibition “Theoria” by Zoran Poposki in Mala Stanica
The exhibition “Theoria” by Zoran Popovski will be opened on June 15th 2017, in multimedia centre Mala Stanica at 8.00 PM.
Macedonian interdisciplinary artist Zoran Poposki’s latest project entitled “Theoria” is based on the principles of multilevel research in the field of cultural and social theories and practices, positioning himself as an analyst and critic of a multitude of topics relating to identity, territory, public space, etc.
His current series of post-conceptual drawings entitled Theoria which he has been focused on developing from 2015 onwards, so far contains 65 works (of which the exhibition at the National Gallery of Macedonia presents a selection of 22), and according to the author represents a series of portraits of “monumental figures from the world of philosophy, literature and art, and [his] personal beacons, from Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf to Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler.”
The portrait as the basis of visual representation and (in this case) an impulse of signifying practice, can firstly be interpreted on the basis of the standard definition according to which it is a depiction of a character or a figure as the main subject; one of the main characters in the work that is meant to emphasize its physical and psychological particularity, but is also a representation of the memory of a person. In terms of the relationship between the portrait and the self-portrait, it is necessary to emphasize Zoran Poposki’s previous practice in which he has commonly used ” first-person spech.” In particular, the aforementioned topics of interest in Poposki are presented and perceived by the author’s appearance in his own works, upon which he has built the narrative, as well by communicating an ironic and subversive political and social view.
Zoran Poposki’s multilayered suggested narrative is initiated as his personal interpretation of the “character and work” of famous philosophers who have been the founders or have had a major influence on various reference systems of values, and are represented as archetypal images. In a formal visual / artistic sense, their faces emerge as contours from the background or have been painted on them, and insisting on the line that gets the function of a signifyer is a kind of return to drawing as one of the basic artistic elements. Combining different techniques (ink, acrylic ink, graphite, lumokolor, gouache, graphite on paper), as one of the possible reminiscences offered by the author in his drawings are the coloring books and the creative freedom to writing on “the offered forms.”
A crucial topic of interest in the ideologically-autonomous works of Zoran Poposki is the interpretation of the terms ‘culture’, ‘ideology’, ‘identity’, ‘territory‘ and ‘theory’. His latest drawings are dominated by “scattered” fragments of collective cultural memory, of art history of from different periods and regions, details of architecture, texts, ornaments, floral elements, geometric designs, shapes… In such a visualization, all the allegories, messages and values, both in their perceptual as well as aesthetic sense, by means of their juxtaposition to the totality serve to emphasize the intertextuality of the narrative.
In his interdisciplinary visual research, Zoran Poposki positions himself as an interpreter, creating an “open work” with possible networks of inexhaustible relationships present in the complex signifying powers of the images. His visual meta-language in the cycle of drawings Theoria, based on a multitude of sign structures, and conditioned by the linguistic analytical games, contexts and relationships, offers an exciting reading through the reconstructing of the models of postmodern deconstruction of narration.
Maja Cankulovska-Mihajlovska