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Slaven Tolj. Craquelure. Pavo and me Eng

Slaven Tolj
Craquelure. Pavo and me

Palazzo d’Accursio, Collezioni Comunali d’Arte, Bologna (I)
January ― March 2023

Can’t you see a crack, there on the skin?
Daniele Capra




Slaven Tolj’s solo exhibition Craquelure. Pavo and me consists of some fifteen sculptural and documentary artworks and the performance Bologna, February 2023, conceived specifically for the Municipal Collection at Palazzo d’Accursio. The project is a condensed retrospective in which the exhibited works highlight Toly’s ability to position himself as an interstitial element between inner, interpersonal and political dynamics, thus developing an intimate narrative unfolded on a double track of personal life and expressive research. The exhibition is dedicated to photographer Pavo Urban, a friend of the artist who died in the war in Dubrovnik on 6 December 1991. Urban’s photographs from the Rosarium series are also on display, documenting a performance Tolj made in the Croatian city.

Body art and conceptual art have always been at the core of Slaven Tolj’s work, from his beginning in the late 1980s to the most recent works, which bear witness to some vicissitudes following a stroke that undermined his linguistic abilities. His research, for that matter, is fueled by a persistent interaction with human and professional events experienced firsthand. Tolj’s visual experience builds on the experience of pain and all torments that tear existence apart, leaving it marked with deep scratches. As an artist, Tolj is an attentive being to the highest degree. He is not only capable of perceiving and recording, like a seismograph, the imperceptible variations of the human being, understood as a sort of complex telluric ecosystem, but he is also able to process this data, without taking any pathetic or fictional drift.

Tolj’s work is radical, speaking openly about life, grief, memory, loss, abandonment, incommunicability and defeat. These feelings and experiences are delivered to the viewer as if they were questions – with geometric and sharp precision. Indeed, both his objets trouvés and his performances are soundings and results from real life in all its unexpected essentiality. Yet, what the artist operates on is scale, as Tolj has the ability to not merely transcribe an event or story, but to convey its overwhelming and piercing intensity in the form of an object or action.

In Tolj’s vision, the artwork is a device that enables transmission of experience: a narrative device that amplifies and unearths an element of importance, which would otherwise go unnoticed. Indeed, the work highlights, stresses and emphasizes what would drown in the banality of everyday and indistinct matter: it generates questions with respect to the present moment, the past, relationships, or memory. Moreover, the artwork is an element of mediation and relationship between the artist, his body and the context in which it was generated: a lens that makes visible and legible a discontinuity in the ordinary fabric, a crack or an unhealed wound.

Through his own presence, by means of minimal actions performed with his own body, and by displacing small objects, Tolj thus highlights the cracks and breaks that life and history inflict on the fabric of our existence – like the craquelure that appears on the surface of oil paintings as time passes. And he does not restore or reassemble those margins that are the result of opposing tensions. He rather emphasizes the contrast and progressive rip.

Therefore, for the artist the artwork is a way of inhabiting the world in an interrogative form: a repeated yet uncertain habitus. It is a space of frontier and dissent, with which he interrogates the viewer and invests him with an intense emotional charge – all this without rhetoric, but rather with a scarce yet much needed language. Thus the author reveals the immense and blinding rawness of reality, and of those events that one would probably prefer not to encounter.

Tolj’s life and research have been marked by the historical events that led to the tragic breakup of Yugoslavia: from fratricidal war to the deaths of loved ones, and the deep political and social change that followed. In his artistic practice, as well as in his work as a curator and director of cultural institutions, the artist has acutely recorded the pervasive way in which consumerism and anthropological change penetrated society in the aftermath of the war. He also managed to render the drastic transformation of his city, Dubrovnik, due to the impact of mass tourism.

Similarly, even strictly personal issues such as the transformation of his body acted as a fundamental lens for the artist to observe reality. His personal history, his body damaged by a stroke, the rehabilitation exercises to regain use of language, but also the difficulty in conveying his thoughts verbally: all this became the humus that generated new works. Yet, there is no exhibitionism whatsoever, as for him the body is an unrivaled instrument of investigation and detection, capable of probing, and then providing a poetic image of all the thunderstorms, the glimpses of light and the winds that stir the clouds of our lives. Tolj is straightforward and direct, showing his own intimate truth without compromise, even when he reveals deep and human fragility.

In Community Spirit in Action (1998) Tolj performs in a Zagreb peep show together with a stripper, presenting his own body lying completely defenceless, covered by a cloth. The work sheds light on a somewhat paradoxical situation: the presence of a body-artist’s body goes almost unnoticed, while a woman’s body – although exploited and sexually objectified – is the subject sought and desired by the viewers’ gaze.

The photograph Untitled (1997) bears witness to a historical event that occurred during the war in former Yugoslavia: the majestic chandeliers of St. Ignatius Church in Dubrovnik were removed to prevent them from falling on people due to bombing. The objects were thus replaced with simple industrial bulbs with no identity.

In A tattoo of the logo of Rijeka’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (2013), the artist gets the museum’s logo tattooed on his shoulders – an action performed right after being appointed director of the MMSU museum. This is both an intimate and political work: the artist demonstrates his personal dedication to his new institutional role, yet, being an artist himself, this performative action also highlights how museums can turn into a brand and a yardstick of value of one’s work.

In the performance Dubrovnik-Valencia-Dubrovnik (2003), Tolj remains shirtless after removing a dozen garments, each of which has a black button symbolizing a friend lost in the war. He then tears off one of the buttons and decides to sew it onto his own skin with needle and thread – as if it were a medal to be pinned to his chest. However, this gesture becomes a sign of mourning instead, a pain that leaves one naked, and from which one can no longer free oneself.

The black sign indicating mourning is also the central element of the work Untitled (1991), consisting of a mirror placed on the floor, the upper corner of which is covered by a strip of dark fabric. The mirror, almost perpendicular to the floor, reflects the lower part of the viewer’s body, whose feet make the context more apparent, and allow for a more accurate reading of the space. The work addresses an absence, a loss that from time to time becomes apparent, in an unexpected, subliminal and painful way.

Untitled (1999) consists of two Croatian flags, one of them faded, knotted by the artist. The work is a political statement with respect to the cult of personal identity, now completely lost, and nationalism, greatly increased in the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia, and since the beginning of the new century also throughout Europe. By means of this work, the artist highlights the impossibility of finding an appropriate position with respect to the logics of geopolitics, but also his personal discomfort of not feeling fully represented by either flag. Installed in the Sala Urbana of the palace, where emblems and coats of arms abound, the work can be read as a sarcastic reference to the insane pulverization of identity.


In the performance Bologna, February 2023, Tolj remains undressed in the space of the Sala Urbana, waiting for something to happen, for a relationship to manifest. In his ears the song “Bella ciao” plays, one of the first things he recognized when he started recovering after the stroke. Then, that music becomes explicit, present, indicating the presence of an interlocutor, of a possible new dialogue, or a rebirth. Even in its unbearable weight, life is a tragic challenge that deserves to be accepted.

In Rosarium (1988) the artist stands naked in front of the altar of a church, in a state of anticipation and purity, an aspect that can be read both as a veiled reference to the nudity of the Christ child, typical of Christian iconography, but also as a declaration of willingness by Tolj – who was then very young – to face the challenges that life poses, as a man and as an artist. The performance inevitably alludes to the human condition and to the already written destiny that cannot be avoided. This aspect has acquired painful intensity since the documentation of the performance was created by the photographer Pavo Urban, a friend of the artist, who died during the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991.

Intermezzo Eng

Giovanni Morbin, Slaven Tolj
Intermezzo

Trieste Contemporanea, Trieste (I)
October ― December 2021

Daniele Capra




Intermezzo consists of ten works ranging from sculpture to video, from site-specific intervention to performance. The show analyses how a work can be understood as an interstitial element of relationship between the body of the artist and the context in which it manifests itself. In theatrical language, the intermezzo is a pause that marks the division between several parts of a representation or a performance, and is considered as an element of interruption of the narrative flow: it is a transitory parenthesis that foresees the suspension of the fiction, and temporarily marks the return to everyday reality. It is a brief space of hybridization in which the viewer feels the overlap between the fictional writing of the work and that of one’s own life (made by reality, one’s own system of relations, ideology, context). Intermezzo emphasizes how the work, especially in the case of artists dealing with Body Art and Performance Art such as Morbin and Tolj, is an uncertain and open habitus. It is a space of mediation and frontier, but also of estrangement, since the viewer is not always aware of the conventions of that context or of what is going to happen. As an intermediate element between the artist’s expression and the environment in which the viewer moves, the work becomes a sort of second skin, also endowed with expressive functions. It covers and keeps warm the most intimate and complex aspects of the individual, but, at the same time, conveys to the outside the perceptions and physical and psychic energy.


Giovanni Morbin’s research is characterized by the analysis of behaviour and posture, the volume, the presence of the body and its projections towards the outside through performance and sculpture. In the works of the series Non sto più nella pelle (“I’m not in my skin any more”), the artist moves significant portions of his body onto the external surface, creating conceptual self-portraits through the use of his own blood: in this way his body takes on a liquid form and becomes an intimate element of writing and drawing, but also of translation of its own volume towards outside of his body. Scultura sociale (“social sculpture”) is a work in constant evolution, made up of modular, semi-spherical elements in metal, that can be freely combined with existing objects, such as chairs, tables, doors, wardrobes, or any other object. It is a “social” sculpture precisely because of its ability to enter into a context and interact with it in a functional and visual form, being able, even ironically, to spontaneously latch onto the existing.


Slaven Tolj’s practice is the result of a deep inner digging, in which elements of the author’s personal life are frequently merged with a lucid analysis of the socio-political context, and condensed into the form of performance and sculpture. The site of the stroke is an existentialist ready-made consisting of a tailor-made men’s suit that has been rendered essentially unusable, as many of its openings were sewn with a red thread: it is an empty space, a volume that is endowed with shape but cannot have a function, since a (visible) constraint blocks it, and reduces it to being a complement, an impotent accessory, as often happens to human beings in the most important issues of their lives. A tattoo of the logo of Rijeka’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art was created in the weeks following his appointment as director of the MMSU, when Tolj decided to have the museum logo tattooed on his shoulders. It is an intimate and at the same time subtly political work about the condition of being an artist and the art system. On the one hand, the artist testifies to his total personal commitment to his new institutional role. But on the other, also highlights to the fact that museums are often a brand and a yardstick for judge the importance of an artist during her/his career.