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NATAŠA VUKOVIĆ
Reality is a fairy tale
In Begović's Adventurer at the door to Agneza (a dying girl) comes a Stranger – death, to fulfill her last request. The heroine wishes for a life filled with love, after which the „protean Death“ (Senker) takes her through a series of situations modeled on entertaining literature or at the time very early films (the play was performed in 1925). On the girl's insistence on reliving a „real life“, the Stranger answers – „The cinema then!“. In that short line the whole drama is mirrored: the ideal life of a young girl, her maturation and dreams are experienced (by herself) through the mediation of film, theatre, fairy tale. The painter's world which Nataša Vuković shows to us in this exibition is just like that. The paintings the artist creates are inspired by fair tale scenes on which generations od children have grown up, and which in turn have shaped their peception of reality (hence the title). Sugary characters on these paintings – porcelain dolls, ladybugs, children – are put on a background colored dark blue, purple or pink: colors which suggest a world of little girls. With them here are the archetypal motifs of psychoanalysis (box – a woman), or the naiveté of both children and adults (four leaf clover), as well as special frame cuts which bring to mind film as a source of fascination. On the rough texture of the base, which evokes a „non ironed out“ reality, child's play and its representatives, as well as designs imprinted from textiles, are the main compositional elements of every painting, that emphasize a child's point of view which transforms, beautifies and enstranges the reality. Coexistence of uterine color texture with an ornament and other things points to a childhood which is at the same time an idyllic period and a period of traumatic battles between ideals and reality. That is both a carefree time, and the time of great disappointments (which are necessary consequences of great beliefs); and a time of simple enjoyment in imagination, and of a traumatic, procrustean tugging of reality to fit the measurements of that imagination. But in spite of the cold inviolability of reality, each individual is branded forever by childhood, it marks his way of seeing the world so much that the reality which we face is not „objective“ but „ours“. Artists accurately record this inner transformation and the permanence of peronality, and the fruit of this are also the realizations of Nataša Vuković. Together with all the fairy tale inventory the paintings of this artist show a very far away horizon – an echo of yearning for the new and unexplored which follows some people from childhood, filling them with dissatisfaction, suspicion, a desire to create. This is a melancholy that overtakes us while we think about the dead times of our youth, lost, and yet present in every fraction of our mind (if the mind can be divided at all). Feđa Gavrilović
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