White absence

Opening Speech of József Mélyi

''I envisaged the exhibition, as regards space, in the same way that Mallarmé arranged the lines on the page of his book ’Throwing Dice will Never Abolish Chance’. The white stretches of wall between the works create a space in which various works are interwoven with silence. The works refer to the following words: humour, empty, sad, absurdity, poor, simple, painful, futile and banal. The silences refer to you.''
Mladen Stilinović

Since the seventies, Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović’s work has revolved around the issue of whether linguistic and visual signs can be separated from ideology; whether symbols, colours and slogans can be divested of their political and artistic context. The recycling of the symbols of constructivism or socialist realism – also basic extreme values in the region – at once refers back to the original contexts and suspends them. The artist is thoroughly familiar with the linguistic plays of the communist regime and observes those of capitalism with some aloofness; his works are ironic and often melancholic comments to the aesthetics of appropriation.

At the time of the Yugoslav War, helplessness and the lack of means compelled the artist to turn away from political reflection towards silence and the narratives inherent in it. When words dwindle into the silence of lost meaning, the unspeakable transpires from his consequent and devoted contemplations about pain and loss. The almost monochrome installation constructed of small everyday objects in the gallery space uses the dynamics of shift, equivalence and repetition to speak about silence, intimacy and pain: the colour white.