Simonida Rajčević

Simonida was born on April 2nd 1974 in Belgrade, Vlajkoviceva Street, where she finished her primary and secondary education. She enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1992, got her bachelor’s degree in 1997, won a DAAD (The German Academic Exchange Service ) scholarship and attended post-graduate studies in 1997/1998 In Berlin and became a member of ULUS in the same year, got her master’s degree in 1999, , and became an assistant to Professor Cedomir Vasic at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. She is now completing her doctor’s degree, and working as junior professor at the same University. She had more than 10 individual and more than 20 group exhibitions, and has received many awards. Simonida’s very first solo exhibition was way in 1995 at the Student Cultural Centre Gallery in Belgrade. It was an installation named “The last survivors from Nostrom”. Inspired by the story about a superhuman being with the great power of it’s transformable nature, which first appears in the movies Alien, Simonida made this giant construction of hanging metal plates which represents a turning point in technological overcoming of infinity of the Universe – she turned an encounter with the horrifying power into a multi dimensional myth of media culture. Her next exhibition, “Express Old Masters Non-Stop”, was in 1997 at the “Zvono” Gallery. This is a first series of her large format paintings, also named ‘plastic angels’. Recalling the great masters of painting such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio, on these paintings Simonida presented what Alberti has said in his Tractate on painting: “…There are movements of body: growth, shrinkage, illness, recovery, movements from one place to another.. We, the painters who want to show the movements of spirit by movements of body parts, use only the movements from one place to another.” In other words, what was meant is that expression is achieved only through the relation between the bodies in the painting and thus the age of theatricality begins in art, and so does in Simonida’s painting. And this very expression of movement, whether spiritual or physical, becomes the stamp and one of main distinctions of her following artwork.

	However, what one can see on Simonida’s paintings is that the body is ecstatic, dominant but vulnerable; body is that thing that causes or presents the aim of God’s intervention; a body whose anatomy is exposed to a delirious painter’s experimentation, shortenings, extractions, deformations, or denotations of unnatural coloring. She puts these ‘plastic angels’ in impossible positions recalling Michelangelo’s figura serpentinata, a manneristic mobile form which was compared to the sight of the flame. This figure depends less and less on the real qualities and potential of the body, so the space of the painting becomes less a stage, and more a specific space in which the laws of gravity are decreased and illusion of movement is developed on both imaginary sides of the painted surface. Using the acrylic on canvas technique, Simonida makes fast brush moves which are required by the high speed of the drying paint. That Is why these paintings are full of motion, the “fiery moves”, orientated towards plastics of figures which is achieved by warm, but also “poisonous” coloring with just a few cold shadows. Let’s do not forget that the choice of acrylic is interesting in the conceptual way too, for acrylic is a technique of the 20thcentury, the color which Jackson Pollock poured out over his canvases.

In 1998 Simonida made a tribute to her year-and-a-half-long post-graduate studies in Germany, named “Berlin Mainstream”. On these paintings she represented massive cranes as a symbol of the city of Berlin at that time – under construction, expanding and widening, rebuilding itself. By mostly using black, white, red and gold, she marked this period as a kind of a “golden era”, in her own and life of the city itself.

Following series of her works is actually made using combined techniques of digital print and acrylic on canvas. It is named “Truth for the truth” and consists of negatives of already ancient posters of rock and roll and pop icons such as Patti Smith, Nick Cave and Elvis Presley, assembled with Romanic and Gothic architecture as the monuments of human persistence and effort, with images of stone carved archangel Michael, the judge and witness with scattered wings, and the statue of Jesus himself, bowing over the images of these modern gods of music and popular culture. This cycle of paintings offers sights of physical delights and temptations of civilizational recognizing, as well as vivid character of this dynamic exchange and flow of time. One that is quite similar with her first series of paintings - the ‘plastic angels’ by form and course of prosecution is a series of Simonida’s untitled paintings from 2006. Only these are the ‘dark angels’, the sinners and tortured souls. Here we see the bodies tied up, knotted down, cramped as they wage their mutual and inner battles. There is no longer just the flaming serpentine figure – it’s replaced by a vortex of strong emotions of sorrow and darkness. The domineering color is black, consistent with motives and themes on these paintings: the weight of love, life and death; manifestations of hatred, pain and suffering, the eternal Prometheus’ agony, as well as passion and tainted love. There is red blood over the sheets, there is dirt and chaos; Simonida is twisting the human being inside out. There is no misinterpretation of this series. This is “the mess we’re in” and the dark reality of human life. As abstract as the nature of the presented themes is, the form and shapes on these paintings begin to get more and more abstract as well, but the lines and borders of the main figures still stay bold, ruff and unambiguous. Simonida will continue to evolve in this direction, aiming towards disfiguration and breaking down the form. Simonida’s following works in the 2007 are two monumental canvases, each ten meters long, named “THE SNAKEWALLS”. By its structure and composition, one Snakewall is more linear in its narration, more gradual and analogue. The other one is fragmented, unpredictable, closer to digital language code. However, both are fiercely expressive and dramatic, both full of tension, characteristic for the matter that is about to break and explode. The crucial element of these walls is, naturally, the richly symbolic snake – the symbol of Man’s original sin according to the Bible, but also the symbol that unites the aspects of ground and underground, water and fire, positive and negative, but also the principles of male and female, signifying sexual duality.

An important support role in the construction of the Snakewall naturally belongs to the wall itself – a barrier towards the unknown, a restriction, an obstacle, a line of division but also a strong carrier of civilization messages from the Western (Wailing) Wall, through the Great Wall of China to Berlin Wall and many other nameless walls.

Realized in the poetic key of „the Creation of the World“ (entailing both the story of the sin as well as the story of the serpent), with implicit aroma of drama and pathos, the two friezes resonate with the thunder of God’s wrath after the original sin was committed, the wrath which destroyed the pure and idylic world of Eden. Creating her own monumental compositions, Simonida chooses and relies on elements from common civilizational art collection, primarily the underscored carnal element and Eros that support her thought – from antique sculptures, through the figurative codes of Michaelangelo, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, as well as Haring and Basquiat, with touches of Goya and literature of Boris Vian, to the reminiscences and quotes from movies Emanuela, Last Tango in Paris, In the Realm of the Senses, and many other French erotic movies, all the while borrowing important influences from graffiti art, comics, film techniques and rock’n’roll... Black, white and red, sometimes they are more of a drawing, sometimes more a painting, in the dramatic storm of Eros and Tanatos.

The symptomatic point of one of these two Snakewalls, the one with a more compact narrative line, is surely a place where the cut is made from color to black and white (this meaningful cut, among other things, marks the transition from painting to film quotations). Somewhere on the borderline between these two worlds, in the color field, we recognize as a dominant figure one of Laocoon’s sons from El Greco’s famous painting Laocoon. German archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, points out to the paradox of getting the impression of exquisite beauty while observing the scene of death and fall. With the same suspense of Eros and Tanatos, Simonida unites all protagonists of the two friezes into one big Laocoon’s family entangled into serpent’s coil.

	The latest artworks of this extraordinary artist, painted during 2008, are mostly inspired by themes and concepts from books and plays of one of the famous contemporary English playwright, Sarah Kane. So, Simonida is once again dealing with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture - both physical and psychological - and death. As the main drive in this series of paintings, the most important is almost complete disfiguration of painted bodies and constant insistence on large scale, which again emphasizes severity of the issues incorporated in compositions of bodies and in Sarah Kane quotations which are whritten in the corners of the canvas. She distinctively questions the gender and sex issue, and paints various relations between two (or more people), different roles, different positions, but always infiltrated by enormous amount of sky-high-scale emotions – the high level of most of today’s impressions and experiences from our every-day urban, social and private life. These canvases can be taken for a mirror of contemporary naked reality, of disordered and twisted relationships between people today; they also represent human basic grieving and suffering, which is indicated by the dominance of red and purple, symbols of guilt, sin and anger, colors connected with blood, sex, lust, passion, love and beauty. 

Therefore, Simonida constitutes her own painting language as a synthesis of inevitable modern social factors, traditional and highly recognizable codes of mythological, symbolic and visual culture system, and off course, her own personal respirations, attitudes, and cravings. In the techniqual and stylistic manner of speaking, she is certainly embracing abstraction as a final layer on top of what can be defined as figurative expressionism and social consciousness. Finally, what makes Simonida a great artist is not just the extra large dimension of her canvas, it’s the option she gives to the observer: a possibility to enter deeper and more subjectively into the core of her giant figures, as well as to solve the attractive mystery of her monumental paintings.