A CANVAS IS NEVER EMPTY

installation (20 documentary photographies 40x50cm,
2 framed embroidered canvases 30x40cm)

The process of embroidery – and the ultimate result of decision-making – is the foundation for the work exhibited at the PM Gallery / Gallery of Extended Media. The process of (needle)work is lengthy; 120,000 stitches is a lot of time for reflection.
According to Tao Te Ching nothing (the emptiness) is a source of unlimited supply of energy. The whole Universe was created from that same nothing; also, our best ideas are created from the emptiness of our mind, and our best creations manifest from these ideas. Even Malevich was, with his “Black Square” aspiring to the idea of zero point of painting and claimed that it is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins (Matthew Drutt, editor, Kazimir Malevich Suprematism. (New York: A Guggenheim Museum Publication, 2003.), 40.), while Rauschenberg presented his “White paintings” as a fait accompli that leaves viewers with no option but to accept them as they are.
With that in mind, at the crucial moment, I decided to stay true to my previous minimalistic expression, and embroider a fully white canvases, reducing them to “zero”. I look at this work as a transmedia printmaking, as an acknowledgment of interrelationship of two media, rather than as the annulment of printmaking, or as supremacy of canvas / image over the print.
This choice is in accordance with the blind prints – stripped of their content – that I exhibited at first out of three exhibitions related to my research in the field of printmaking (“Prints“, Karas Gallery, 2015). With this act, I am closing the circle; white canvas, which contains print (½) – a matrix after which it was embroidered – at its core, becomes a “clean slate”, a surface containing endless possibilities. All summarized in the conditional “nothing“.
In this case, it is an absolute truth that a canvas is never empty.

Exhibited @ 2017 A canvas Is Never Empty, HDLU, PM Gallery / Gallery of Extended Media, Zagreb (HR)
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