We can only make sense of our life and surroundings by incessantly
reading the texts supplied by our spaces and places, our historical
circumstances, political systems, psychological processes, and of
course by the plethora of images unleashed by the media, literature
and art. So, how in this context are Kozina's paintings to be read?
The artist himself constantly reinterprets art history and questions
his position in contemporary art. He draws on an eclectic range
of critical sources in his work, which he redeploys through textual
or visual quotation. On one of his canvases, we read the word medaš
(landmark), which has been crossed out and denied. This is a mocking
allusion to critics' obsessive search for canonical works that serve
as turning points in art history, such as Picasso's Mademoiselle
d'Avignon, Malevich's White Cube on White, or Jackson Pollock's
action paintings. On the other hand, there is a reference to postmodernist
artistic practice in which the concepts of'originality' and authorship
are rejected. Nevertheless, Kozina does sign his paintings, but
maintains that there is no correct reading of them or even way to
turn them. This ambiguity is addressed by the theorist Griselda
Pollock, who while rejecting the myth of the individual artist genius,
has recently turned to critical tools such as 'creativity' and 'singularity'
in order to read contemporary art.
In his new series of paintings, there is a clear movement towards
the purification of the visual field, in contrast to his previous
work. The artist talks about his earlier paintings as being existentialist
in character and regards them now as documents. 'I could never do
such graphisms anymore, I'm more interested in monochromy, now every
extra brush stroke seems superfluous.' By stripping his paintings
of supplementary content, Kozina lifts them from the present day
and places them in a trans-historical context: 'I'm interested in
the holistic view of the world and its spiritual dimension.'
Another important paradigm to be found in his work is the interconnection
between art and science. This is manifested on various levels, for
example, the mathematical curve is taken as the theme of one painting.
The artist often refers to physics in his explanation of the use
of colour. In this series, yellow, orange, and red are interpreted
as colours that radiate out of the paintings and reach towards us.
These warm colours are also the elemental colours of alchemy. Further,
the artist compares his practice to the centrifugal movement in
physics, which works as a spiral starting from the centre and moving
out, catching and effecting everything in its path.
And finally, one of the basic elements of visual literacy is the
fact that when we look at the world, like many other organisms,
we tend to see faces in things. W.J.T. Mitchell states that 'evidently
it's hardwired in our brains to respond to signs in the environment
that could be taken for eyes or a face.' Examples from nature range
from eyes of oysters, to the way the faces of owls are mimicked
in the 'little eyes' on the wings of butterflies. When talking about
his paintings, Zlatko Kozina correspondingly suggests that we read
eyes into even the most abstract forms: These are faces for me,
and the position of eyes, nose and mouth is a cosmic composition.'
In the intertextual confusion of our everyday, these archetypal
signs still appear and remind us that we're not alone.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Zlatko Kozina was born in Slavonski Brod in 1968. He graduated
from the Painting Department of the Academy in Rijeka. He lives
and works in Slavonski Brod as a teacher of Fine Art His last solo
show in Slavonski Brod was in 2002.
Nazad