Barrel Gallery

Trg žrtava fašizma bb

Ivica Malčić: I Don’ t Want to Grow Up

12 - 31 May, 2009

Exhibition opening is May 12, 2009 at 8 pm.

Ivica Malčić & I Don’t Want to Grow Up

I held in my hands drawings, frottages, cut-outs, collages with bills and figures, in colour, in black and white, one for each day of the last year. I held these three hundred and sixty drawings by Ivica Malčić, dated and numbered, covered with sketches, notes, copied text and author’s writing. The author’s discourse   implies, through the drawings “beyond paper”, intricate complexity of aesthetic, linguistic, social and metaphysical values. Graphic recording of a year in drawings and sketches has become a specific mode of expression from 2006 on: thus   the author leaves trace, articulates his work in a distinctive way. Everyday working process is a part of Malčić’s wider concept: it started in 1995 with 100-painting exhibitions every year in a row. His world of painting and his world of drawing are two neighbouring and related worlds, both similarly determined by pleasure and control, decision and pleasure of   self-representation. The author’s “showdown with time” endorses renown artistic models equating art with life, marking the artist’s identity and place within the framework of art, despite all limitations and lapses…In terms of Croatian conceptual practice you can compare it with “My Year” by Željko Jerman (1977), a work compiled of three hundred sixty five dated photos and diary entries – traces of one’s own existence.  Having a very emotional and intuitive core as well, Malčić’s work can be interpreted in terms of post conceptual art distinguished by absence of stylistic consistency, individualism and inter-textual interrelation of various non-artistic phenomena (culture, politics, spirituality, elements of narration and theory) into complex presentation models.

How come that it is so easy to bury this quest for free space with dusty facts, to put a hurdle made of words on the path between art and life, I ask my self? Do I need a different beginning? No, I don’t think so… I’ll quote Ajar on that: There is no beginning. I was born, everyone awaits his turn, and after that it is all only about belongingness. I tried everything to brake free, but no one has /pulled it off   yet…

It is exactly this broken and fragile line of free existence accompanied by an uneasy feeling of one’s own existence that I detect in Maličić’s series. I can hear it  in a candid transfer of the „insufferable easiness“ with which we tackle the art of life day in day out, leisure and discipline, routine and fun, fate and accident: the state where we exist and don’t exist at the same time, like this and like that, here and there … There is no  intellectualizing, just a healthy portion of self-love, a mixture of delight and bitterness, his  works came into existence within a calendar coded cycle, with his own inner timing,  one’s own inherent ticking distinguishing the past and the present, remembrance and oblivion, yearning and reality.

The cover page of the favourite magazine borrowed from the Goethe Institute Library, a pasted  receipt slip for tax declaration, recorded VHS inventory bought at the flee market Hrelic, a documented new exhibition of paintings. There are family photos inserted, picture-in-picture: recollections of childhood and growing-up, pictures depicting his work place at school, pictures of broads, pictures of self-realization, pictures of crisis…In an easygoing manner these drawings ironize, in a postmodernist manner, the concept of the original, of technique and style canons, create an amusing masquerade, illogical cut, even black humour pastiche. In a well known sweet and sour taste of life, we find out what Malčić reads, watches, listens to; what irritates him and what he rejoices in not only in his everyday life but in the context of his art, especially in relation to Zagreb and Croatia. In open chapters as well as unfinished sheets he declares that he is a painter by inclination  and by decision, which since the avant-garde times carries in itself the burden of constant questioning and re-examining, reconstructing place, status, belonging to an artistic relationship network; despite all repetitions, limitations and lapses….Through the  author’s January to December marathon, the intimate and the private is entangled with the media and the social, transformed into something  artistic and symbolic, and the resulting polyphony of voices goes far beyond the initially set coordinates of time and space.

The life spins together with his work in 366 sheets, as if ready made, with crossed, copied, clipped, deleted, invented content, visual and verbal sketches of the real and the symbolic. This paper carousel turns borrowed, new and old elements, circling on the map of referential relationships towards one’s own work and creation process, existential situation and broader artistic surroundings.  Through emotional and self reflexive discourse everyday life is confronted with the  art establishment, petit-bourgeois aesthetics collides with market regulation of art, rock and punk slogans mock the imperatives of fame and success, sexuality is mixed with cravings of consumer society. Through the “first person dialogue”, being more of an act of rebellion contained in the title cry itself, we have been led by Malčić’s characteristic counterparts– artistic (logo)types which are found in his paintings like a leitmotif as well as in his 365 drawings presented in 2006. One of them, a “genius” with an erection and two paint brushes in his hands, is fully aware of  how things are in the grown-up world, especially in the art world, but has refused  to grow up. Let’s keep it that way. At least on paper.

Text: Ksenija Orelj

Translation: Vesna Kudumija, BA

Exhibition opening: