If contemporary painters are no longer concerned with asking the question “what is painting”, but rather with how to make paintings in a culture invented, mediated, and transcribed by technology, then it might be logical to speculate that the meaning of “making painting” today lies in demonstrating the incommensurable materiality embedded in the contours of a painterly act. This hypothesis finds its body in Stojakovic’s resin and alkyd-based shimmering color masses. At first glance, Stojakovic’s paintings appear as luminous clusters of floating shapes, frosted drips, and ruptured cytological forms amalgamated into monochromatic grounds. They are neither whimsical or lyrical, but poetic, seductive. When interpreted in relation to the historical conventions of abstraction, Stojakovic’s mixed-media inquiries might be seen as illuminations of the alchemic nature of painting that refuse to be limited by familiar aesthetic categories: beautiful and the sublime—the former on its return from the discursive exile of post-modernity, the latter finding its spirit in the seductiveness of electronic visual interfaces. In this context, Stojakovic’s recent work presents simply an attempt to materialize pictorial topographies and chromatic glimmers in which tactile and visual qualities merge together into an organic splendor that belies the flatness of the picture plane.
Vladimir Spicanovic
Vladimir Spicanovic teaches contemporary art theory and painting at the School of Visual Arts, University of Windsor