The artist’s work, as bare in its presentation as intense in its content and full of questions for the viewer, is pervaded by a dreamlike, sometimes claustrophobic dimension, in which the dominant feeling is the suspension of any judgement. The very title of the exhibition, Staring at the Sun, suggests a precise emotion, that moment when time stands still, sight is blinded and one remains suspended
in a limbo where life seems to be consumed in the waiting. “Staring at the Sun is a silent meditation, the invocation of a universe undone and re-imagined. Not a post-apocalyptic world, but a post-anthropocentric one, not an elegy, but the murmur of the beginning whispered among the debris of the end. In this space, the end is neither feared nor experienced with distress: it is observed, inspired and
allowed to bloom.” writes Tomašević.

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Jelena Tomašević transforms the exhibition space into a personal world in miniature, through works articulated on different levels of language, style, form and content. Three white cushions in the central nave allude to a childlike and dreamy world. On them the artist impresses mathematical formulas and equations representing the direction of the wind or the polarisation of the sun, underlining that physics and its rules can indeed measure natural phenomena, but it is their manifestations that inspire wonder and poetry. On the wall, the three-dimensional drawings, suspended exactly eleven centimetres from the wall, float silently, disengaged from any function or chronology. The works collect the fragments of a distant past: fragments of nature and architecture, anatomical relics and forgotten tools. Different objects, with heterogeneous perspectives and functions, are brought together and used in a common and shared space, beyond the boundaries of the paper. Furthermore, Tomašević states: “Each work of art, made on handmade ecological paper with embedded plant seeds, is not simply an object, but a potential. Life sleeps in its fibres. When surrendered to the natural elements - earth and rain, time and decay - these delicate artefacts can give life to wild flowers, herbs and even trees. Here, paper is not a mere support but a living lung.” On the sides, two magnifying glasses lengthen the drawing, a kind of “third arm”, an extension of the hand and sight, an aid to greater stability and precision. In the video room, two simultaneous projections create scenes suspended between reality and fiction, a realistic theatre made up of fantastic and surreal elements.

 

Tomašević’s exhibition at Artopia reconstructs a parallel reality, a post-human world that, in the tension between reality and dream, opens up a possible new beginning, the recomposition of new spaces after the end of everything. Staring at the Sun proposes a change of perspective and reminds us that humans are
nothing more than passing figures.