January-February 2005: Tocka Cultural Center - Skopje

In technical terms, Zoran Poposki’s latest individual exhibition represents a move beyond his former mode of expression, based exclusively on oils (acrylics) on canvas, into a new kind of media for him – digital prints. The production process of his latest series of ‘expressive portraits’ starts with the photographs of his friends (whose names give the titles of the works) who, by means of a dadaist method of chance, select sentences from works of trivial literature, and in turn that quote becomes their personal ‘statement’. According to the author, the title of the exhibition – HUSH, should be read in terms of Lacan’s ‘muteness’, that is the inability to express something, whereas the randomly chosen sentences, which don’t correspond to their life situations but at the same time strangely correspond to them, tell us something about them after all. The interpretation of these sentences leads us to an entirely different, quasi-serious extreme, even to a psychoanalytical approach in our attempt at perceiving each person and its ‘statement’.

The exhibition comprises a total of eight large-scale digital prints, while the technique in which the works are produced, the concept, as well as their very process of production are completely new for Zoran Poposki (this is his first time that he’s combining photographs, text and sound). Nevertheless, the author leaves ‘his personal mark’ by completing this whole with elements from his painting, such as the perception of space and color as a primary means of expression evident in his previous two exhibitions (‘Journey of Desire’, 2003, at the Cultural Centre Tocka, Skopje, and in 2004 at the Cultural Centre Marko Cepenkov, Prilep).

           The calmness of the characters represented stands juxtaposed to the expressive colors and the ‘free’ expression, the references of which lie in abstract expressionism and action painting. At times one gets the impression that this dominant picturality is in conflict with the title of the exhibition. On the contrary, the expressiveness, interpreted by the author as an expression of inner spiritual and psychological states, contributes towards the realization of the need/necessity for the being to tell its own ‘story’, towards overcoming the barriers to free expression of emotions in a superficial world ruled by muteness.

June 2004: Marko Cepenkov Cultural Center - Prilep

In conceptual terms, Zoran Poposki’s second solo exhibition entitled “Solar” is composed of three groups of paintings which are somewhat similar, but also very different in their treatment of the canvas, as well as the period when they were created. The paintings display references to modernist painterly solutions, exclusively abstract ones, such as abstract expressionism, action painting, color-field painting, post-painterly abstraction, etc. However, Zoran Poposki’s painting is not a conscious attempt at implementing the achievements of these art directions; rather, it is a reflection of his perception of space and color. The unifying aspect of his paintings, formally speaking, is the use of primary colors and expressive gestures, the notion of the painting as a vestige of spiritual and psychological experiences, the absence of identifiable mimetic motifs, and the return to painting through the spiritual framework of (neo) existentialism.

In the cycle consisting of works created during 2001-2002, we encounter paintings of dominating dimensions. The whole field of the painting is filled with painterly material and radiates inner explosive energy. The size of the canvas offers an opportunity for expression as well as painterly experiments in the manner of Jackson Pollock’s dripping paintings. This method of painting underscores the existential and formal act of creation of the work, that is the realization of the painting is performance-like and ritualistic in character. Tactile sensations are inevitable in such a process of creation consisting of total immersion in the painting by means of brushes, palette knives, hands, etc. Expressiveness, interpreted as an expression of inner spiritual and psychological conditions, and the all-over effect are traces of the artistic gesture. Colors intertwine in a rich fabric of emulsion, making it impossible to follow one of them through. The result is a composition of interlaced “lines” and traces potentially endlessly spreading in all directions of the surface of the canvas.  

The second cycle (2001-2004) marks a move towards a “liberation” of the surface of the canvas. There’s a discrete "transition to white", in the direction of lyrical abstraction. Color is still the basic means of expression with its own pictorial and semiotic autonomy; it is an aspect of the surface and the spread over the surface by means of which the autonomous pictorial effect is carried out. Through the painting, which remains a two-dimensional flat surface on which free abstract gestural traces of color are being composed, Zoran Poposki accomplishes a purely pictorial, aesthetic expression.  

The latest works (made in 2003-2004) are a form of refined lyricism. There’s a noticeable development in the direction of a complete devotion to the pictoriality of empty space. There is a suggestion of color-field painting where the painting’s surface is monochrome (white) and stands as a foundation for chromatic and gestural variations, with the base itself becoming a central theme of the painting. There’s an emphasis on superficiality, with the pictorial structures "emerging" from the base, “penetrating" the base, optically “hovering over” the base or partially “covering” it.

             Finally, a general conclusion about Zoran Poposki’s paintings would be that his art is one free from the constraints of rationality and fully given to the free expression of emotions.

May-June 2003: Tocka Cultural Center - Skopje

The great mountaineer Hillary has a celebrated quote: “I climb the hill because it’s there”. But there’s also a famous addition by the minimalist artist Carl Andre: “The mountaineer climbs the hill because it’s there. I create art because there isn’t any”.

This is one of the possible answers why in the transition cloacae called Skopje there are still some artist teetering about: they create art because out here there isn’t any around.

When I say this, I’m referring primarily to the paintings of Zoran Poposki. Why today in Skopje, such – at first glance – “anachronous" (maybe modernist in a postmodernist age) art that is strongly akin to Jackson Pollock’s, Kandinsky’s, Miro’s? The answer is simple - it’s here because there isn’t any around. It’s here because modernism, with all its complex diverging directions, in Macedonia is a quite degenerated – should I say deformed – octopus. That’s why I get the impression that the pictorial gesture, the actionist expressive strokes (just like a squid squirting ink all around, defending itself) that Zoran Poposki resorts to, are deeply justified right now and right here, and perhaps more in a certain emotional than intellectual sense.

The important contemporary media artist and theorist Peter Weibel says: “The more people adjust, the greater the pressure is to invent some kind of a savage painting. All of the promises art as an ideological fantasy makes – sovereignty, individuality, freedom, authenticity – it cannot keep.

We’re talking about freedom of art, while in reality it is completely managed, just like everything else, starting with the galleries, museums and prices. It became a part of the market: economy as culture. Or, when the claim arises that art is something individual, mysterious, in reality it must be binding for all in order for it to be comprehensible and to be able to take part in the general aesthetic codes. These contradictions make art an ideological fantasy and a fraud”.

I believe that Zoran Poposki, both on account of his youth and his position in society, more or less knows what Weibel is talking about: art is capitalism’s ideological fantasy. When the economy produces a new notion of the object, art still tries to save the old notion of the object – aesthetically or auretically; which means saving what’s disappearing, while anti-art is trying to affirm the new notion of the object and against art. Art is a kind of a “vanishing lady”; it tries to grab what’s disappearing. And because it also disappears in the process, we love it with all our hearts.

Thus, feeling an unusual sincerity of disappearance and devotion in Zoran Poposki’s paintings, but also a rather stubborn cerebrality which almost resembles escapism, I would like to salute his first exhibition, aware that he’s making just the first step on the painter’s road that will diverge/diverges unpredictably into manifold paths

An invitation to enter a painter’s studio which hasn’t been “officialized” yet, immediately creates a certain reserve. However, in this case I instantly felt a pleasant atmosphere, caused not only by the works that surrounded me, but also from the very first spontaneous talk with the young artist Zoran Poposki. There’re probably other similar “hidden” places where one can come across such an unexpectedly passionate approach to painting. 

Looking at Zoran Poposki’s formal artistic language, it’s easy to determine the relations with certain abstract directions of modernity (action painting, gestural painting etc. of the 1940s, 50s, 60s). He conveys his thoughts through emblematic strokes which create optical effects – results of the color range he willfully chose to pursue. He insists on the speech of primary colors, especially blue.

However, it is Jackson Pollock’s language that we discover first, in the full conquering of the surface, a moment when the painting becomes a fully integrated object, when the painterly is of primary importance. One also notices distant echoes of Joan Miro’s “Constellations”, as well as Wassily Kandinsky’s experience in using a single background color, and often the style of Sam Francis which retains the “traditional” idea of composition.

But, in Poposki’s abstraction, which is close to the 1990s one (topical and defined as “survival of abstract painting”), is precisely “the story”. In it he inserts those emotions which reflect certain spiritual, intellectual or cognitive moments that confirm the closeness with the process implemented by the aforementioned painters, especially with the act of creation of the color field. Thus, for Poposki, conceptualizing a formless configuration (accepted as “free” abstraction) goes not only to support the realization (as a concrete artistic, technological or media process of creation of the artwork), but also causing visions of metaphysical orientations (especially important for the abstract expressionists). For him the painting is an exaltation of being, and that’s why he insists on avoiding three-dimensionality (to emphasize the superficiality of today’s world), as well as on crevices and margins – subtitles for a number of painting in which there’s glimpse of a certain control of emotions, and action has been “banished” to the margins of the work.

Lastly, one can conclude that the level of reading of Zoran Poposki’s pictorial achievements satisfies the “code” of both modernist and postmodernist phenomena.

The triptych comprised of “Waves”, “Silk”, and “Letter”, is distinguished from Zoran Poposki’s other paintings by its minimalist poetics. The centre of the canvases is empty, and that emptiness is modeled by the forms that exist on the margins of these paintings. When I first saw “Silk”, I liked it immediately. Zoran told me the name of the painting, saying it was inspired by the novel of the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco with the same title. I love that book very much and so, maybe that’s why I liked this triptych.

There’s another reason, as well. I myself am marginal and scrape a living at the edges of the centre which in itself looks empty and nonessential to me. Sometimes, I like to be convinced that with very fact that I don’t belong to it, I make the centre more beautiful, giving it life from the edges. For, the way it is now, it would only be a simple empty canvass.

I’m talking daft? I’m simply projecting my personal condition onto “Letter”, “Silk”, and “Waves”? If you think that I’m a self-absorbed twerp – you’re completely right! But, aren’t those who belong to the centre also utterly egotistic?!

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