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Zlatko Kozina
Yellow, Orange, Red...Go!
4
June - 25 June 2004
biography
Zlatko
Kozina: The Colours of Alchemy and Archetypal Signs
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 meda¹ (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 post-modernist 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
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