Brigita Antoni’s first solo exhibition in Ulcinj

Marko Stamenkoviq

Brigita Antoni’s first solo exhibition in Ulcinj opens on Saturday, October 19, 2019, at the premises of the Art Gallery of the City Museum in the Old Town of Ulcinj. After three solo exhibitions in Montenegro – “Softness of Being” at the Gallery Atelier Dado in Cetinje (2017), “Intrigue” at the Center Gallery in Podgorica (2015) and “Sometimes, something…” at the Sue Ryder Gallery in Herceg Novi (2012) – and several collective exhibitions between 2014 and 2018 (among which those in Podgorica, Belgrade and Cetinje), this artist, born in 1987 in Bar, finally presents her work in Ulcinj, the town where she lives and works.

Stepping away from her usual, predominantly digital visual practice (informed by the knowledge she gained during her studies in graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cetinje), Brigita Antoni now addresses the local audience while experimenting in a “new” medium: a series of paintings under the common and mysterious title “The Moon is Wet and Wild.” This cycle of nine acrylic paintings on canvas – supplemented by a selection of miniature black and white drawings that preceded it, as well as by a subsequently conceptualized object in space – forms a spatial installation that, at first glance, deviates from the expression by which the artist is recognizable on the Montenegrin scene. The basic question posed by an observer who is familiar, or totally unfamiliar, with her past practice might be: what is this “moon” in Brigita’s constellation and why does she envision it like that – as a black spongy stain of variable shapes and sizes or a shadow that reflects almost invisible light from the surface of the canvas, as it intersects the striking line of the horizon against a background of vibrant colors in stark contrast?

Brigita Antoni’s new works, rather not “dry and tame”, were created during 2019 in her living and working environment – in a house surrounded by a huge cultivated garden close to the urban area of Ulcinj or, more precisely, where the Bojana River flows into the Adriatic Sea. Emphasizing the time and place of their creation – and, in particular, emphasizing the connection between their content and the natural (aquatic, but also celestial) ambience in which they were created – is not arbitrary at all, but crucial to understanding this exhibition. Why? Because art exhibitions are not to be merely understood as artworks set in an exhibition space.

Take this exhibition for example: it is a product of what Croats would call “samozatajni svjetonazor”, discreet worldview of a thirty-two-year-old woman whose self-conscious and critical perspective, however unobtrusive, is discretely directed in a particular direction – toward a predominantly patriarchal, macho and sexist environment of human relations, politicized to the point of banality that maintains the general social state of one or more local communities in a perpetual status quo. The mysterious light that Brigita’s “moon” casts on the observers actually lands on their state of inertia, passivity, stagnation and immobility, or on that state of consciousness that holds the masses in a tacit, universally accepted but false sense of security. Like a black stain on her canvases, or its monstrous, nightmarish shadow, such a deformed sense of security emits only but an unpleasant smell of mold – much like the object at the entrance to the exhibition space.

But it is exactly from that moldy position of the “monster”, from the point of the distorted body in the painting, that Brigita summons the image of the anamorphic skull from the sixteenth-century painting by Hans Holbein the Younger (“The Ambassadors”) and sends a secretive, not always visible message to her present-day observers: she calls for a movement, for breaking off from the supposedly stable, straight-line position, for at least a small physical and mental shift that would, like with Holbein, give the observers a new chance for a different, angular perspective on the world in which they live today. That speck, which opens the possibility of a minimal, yet necessary correction of the observers’ worldview, originates in Brigita’s personal perception of nature and society around her: the synthesis of intellectual, emotional and cosmic energy from which this series of works, instead of a visual scream, shapes into a poetic manifestation of public protest speech as a discreet gesture of non-conformity to the given, static state of affairs.

Negatively motivated by the current state, the artist now explores the intimate side of her fascination with “seascapes” (in the conventional sense of the term), in order to understand their relation to physically distant, lesser known and less visible phenomena (astrological, for example). In her own visions of that celestial constellation reflected on the surface of the sea, the non-painter Brigita Antoni finds an inexhaustible source for analysis, interpretation and understanding of individual and collective relationships within the terrestrial constellation – verging on a shaman who “mixes some colors” on the surface of the canvas and interprets their possible meanings at the spot where the sea touches the sky. From that vital line of the horizon, her new cycle of works invites observers to meditate on “that which is above” while touching “what is below”, on transience, transitions and collisions, on tactile and mental, physical and spiritual, and even discreetly sexual relationships and interactions of people and events. Or exactly on those local and global phenomena (natural just as social, and vice versa) that are much discussed in the public sphere today with a seeming lack of understanding and willingness for a concrete action to be taken.

The exhibition will remain open until Monday, 28th October 2019.