Tina Bertović / Principles of Copying and Transmutation

Painting to painting What does it mean to see? What does it mean to see a painting work? These seemingly banal questions open up a whole series of approaches that consider the question of perception – both perceptual and cognitive – in a wide range of scientific and theoretical disciplines. The complex relationship between the observer and the observed makes the phenomenon of seeing a demanding, and at the same time self-conscious procedure. To see means to become aware (to see), whereby the implicit gesture of insight into ... Read More

Picture to picture

What does it mean to see? What does it mean to see a work of painting? These seemingly banal questions open up a whole series of approaches that consider the question of perception – both perceptual and cognitive – in a wide range of scientific and theoretical disciplines. The complex relationship between the observer and the observed makes the phenomenon of seeing a demanding and at the same time self-conscious procedure. To see means to become aware (to see), whereby the implicit gesture of insight also contains an explicit act of observation. Moreover, a precise insight into a work of art necessarily involves trust in sensory mediation. "There is something eye-catching in the word exactly", Mladen Pejaković would say. Paul Valéry, on the other hand, says that we truly know only what we are capable of doing with our own hands. By doing so, he establishes that cognition belongs to the endeavor of art. To see means to be able to see. And the power of seeing goes hand in hand with the ability to understand. Every creative act is a cognitive gesture. To do something truly means to do it with understanding.

Suppose that the painter knows his work. Having recognized it in the act of creation, he truly sees it; he sees it in the full range of its material and formal components. But how does he stand with the observer? What should he do in order to be able to perceive a certain painting in all its complexity? To be able to see it? In all likelihood, he can do this by interpreting the painting using a certain feat of art. This is exactly what Tina Bertović did, asking some fundamental questions about the subject of her vision – about Kršnjavi's painting "Copy according to Jordans", or about Kraljević's copy of the same Jordans template "Satyr visiting the peasants". The exhibited unit that we are attending at this exhibition is a kind of answer to the questions we have listed, and at the same time a demonstration of a certain skill. By looking at her works, we can learn a lot about the copies in question and the original to which they refer. However, we can also learn something about the art of observation itself. Let's try to explain in a few steps what it is really about.

Looking is a process that involves a series of acts. These acts, in turn, can be perceptual and cognitive. In accordance with this, Tina Bertović presented her encounter with these paintings through a series of interpretative procedures. With a series of drawings and paintings of smaller format, she stratified the unique appearance of the template into a series of stagings, where each scene represents a particular perceptual layer of the original. It is an attempt to notice the formative sediments in the original painting, to make the artistic structure belonging to it visible. And this structure is complex. We cannot talk about its complexity in language because we lack the metalanguage belonging to painting. We are not able – as we are in language thanks to grammar – to talk about verbs and nouns, about attributes and appositions, about syntactic rules and grammatical propositions. However, one of the ways in which we can become aware of this specific artistic complex is to depict it with a related means – visual description. By choosing this way of interpretation, Tina Bertović has initiated a kind of tautological procedure. She repeats the visual expression of the original image in different, but related, artistic expressions. 'Picture to picture' – this is how the author's endeavor could be called.

Tina Bertović approaches the stratification of the corresponding formative or perceptual layers almost archaeologically. However, this is not about probing the material structure of the work, but about plunging into the poetic layer of the work – into the levels of its pertinence. This clumsy, rogue word refers to relevance, to the essence of the thing formed. In our case, it refers to the artistic essence, to the way in which the painting in question is made. However, this layering – paradoxically – does not reveal a hidden core, but brings an insight into the relative nature of the artistic whole. There are no main and secondary, first and last layers, but a relational connection of multiple layers that equally belong to the whole of the original. They are invested in it, they have grown together in a completely organic way. Hence the impression of vivisection that is imposed on us: every cut of pictorial interpretation that Tina Bertović undertakes seems to cut alive, as if revealing the vital structure of the treated organism. The lesson that arises from this stratification of vital components evokes the famous Gestalt motto: "the whole is different from the sum of its parts" (Köhler).

Variations on a given theme – or derivatives, as Tina Bertović precisely calls them (from Latin. derivatio: performance, derivation) – indicate those aspects of the original that the layman's eye does not see, while the trained gaze of an artistically literate observer sees it as a specific density of the pictorial layer. The peculiarity of this density lies in the fact that we are most often unable to see through it. We are not able to notice it in the unity of its distinctive aspects. Therefore, each derivation reveals to us a certain level of artistic relations that the original contains. And there are potentially infinitely many of these relative levels. Moreover, their multiplicity is a guarantee of the content of a particular painting. Much like the density of accordions in the vertical stratigraphy of a particular tone produced by a musical instrument speaks of its sonorous quality. If we know that musical accordions (aliquots) are mutually arranged according to the exact principle of proportion (and even order), this analogy can serve us to see the painting as a well-tuned instrument that conveys to us the collective echo of artistic coincidences.

In the artistic analogy, it is a geometric structure of the format that has both generic and generative properties. It is the starting point, but also the developmental basis for the formation of forms and their relationships. The exact, explicit level of the visible in the painting is enabled by the implicit level, the implicit order that, as the "placental layer of the painting" (Pejaković), regulates the arrangement of concrete material and perceptual components of the painting. The implicit order "makes the painting visible"; it makes it visible insofar as it represents the means by which the painter translates and assimilates phenomena into visual facts. In doing so, he relies on those forces that help him in this: the regulating forces of scale, which, as a chained ratio, is spiced up with the proportion of the sides of the given format (in this case, Biauron, or the Golden Ratio Foil).

The didactic approach that Tina Bertović proposes suggests that each painting contains its own interpretation. Its derivatives confirm the statement of Abraham Zemsz, in which the semiotician in question says that painting "contains its own commentary even without its own mediation of language". The author has made it possible for these comments to reach us, to stratify into a series of observed sequences. It is important to emphasize that she did this through the mediation of her own sensibility. After all, there is a pledge of skill in it – the ability to perceive artistic rhyming, to be able to notice proportional coincidences, to be able to notice one's own dramaturgy of artistic relations, which are manifested in preparation and realization, suggestion and delay, plots and denouements of visual tensions. With a sense for the characteristic rhythm of sequences, for harmonious balances and a vision of the whole, Tina Bertović presents herself in this exhibition as an attentive observer. An observer who knows how to see, since she looks through the prism of her own, honed artistic art.

Jagor Bučan

BIOGRAPHY

Tina Bertović was born on 20.11.1987 in Rijeka. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Restoration and Conservation, and graduated in 2013 with the highest honors Summa cum laude and obtained a master's degree. During two years (2015-2017) she underwent professional training at ŠPATULA D.O.O. (mentor Mirta Krizman, dipl. rest.-konz). She is intensively engaged in the restoration and conservation of works of art on various carriers. She is also engaged in painting and has participated in several group exhibitions. She is a regular member of the Croatian Conservation Society (HRD), a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), and since 2016 she has been exhibiting at the Annual Exhibitions of Members. In 2014, she participated in the group exhibition "SLIKONOM, Rethinking the Phenomenon of the Relationship between Originals and Copy/Creative Derivations" at the "STARI GRAD" Gallery in Đurđevac, at the "LONG FRIDAY" event at the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, where she creates an interpretation of a painting in front of museum visitors. She has many years of experience in leading art workshops for children and adults (Atelier Sellier, Kotar Studio and KotarFest!, Space of Imagination, Playroom Above the Clouds, Infoshop Library of Pippilot).

In addition to his profession, he also has a love for movement, whether in the form of dance, yoga, capoeira, acro yoga or funambule (walking on a tightrope). He lives and works in Zagreb.

Contact: tina11bertovic@yahoo.com