#7 When we are experiencing the night without restrictions, the night becomes the perfect place wherein we dwell in its centre in an absolute way, and it will remain a point in the space where we are. In this invocation of the night where one is losing the visual stability, the night is revealing before us the meaning of the objects and the essential fragility of theirs, that is to say, their aptitude to vanish just when they are closest to us. At the level of perception, the night manifests itself as a factor of the “voluminosity” of the place while at the level of the signified, the absolutely neutral character of that which is barely discernible is transformed into a significant operation wherein the constitution of senses is based on absence. The paradigm of night with its concomitant visual anxiousness (an additional reflex that is related to the paintings of Petković) which is, by the by, assumed self-evident, encourages us to label the artist’s works as “sleeping” surfaces or volumes – in a way only the night can be.
#8 There is yet another dialectic image that seems appropriate to approach the parable of the view – that image is the door or the doorstep. The black surfaces with Petković do not appear like doors, but their dialectic nature aćurately condenses the two spatial conditions. Actually, we are either in front of or inside. We all know only too well the riddle of the doorstep from the metaphor presented in 1927 by Marcel Duchamp in his Porte 11, rue Larrey. Namely, Duchamp had noticed the ambiguous coalescence of the arrival and departure – an act that is regularly associated with the door. Thus, he had set up a door between two doorsteps forming two doorways that are inevitably and simultaneously open and closed. The artist is reminding us that the sensibility and senselessness are coexisting in the very paradox, practically bordering the absence of sense. In many a plot and conundrum used in the mythical constructs there is this ambivalent property of the door (as a place of crossing from here to over there or, as a spot of transition or, finally, as a location that cannot be passed across). The door stands as a figure of the opening, or more to the point, of a conditional opening, the one which is blackmailed and blackmailing, capable of taking or giving everything. In front of the painting we stand as if we were in front of an open door whose doorstep we cannot pass over: the believer wants to see what is on the other side, while the man of tautology will turn away since he thinks that he knows the door simply by glancing at it. Looking means simultaneously taking into consideration that the painting is structured as in front of-inside, as a doorstep. The image of the open door is indicative of the unity proper, of the intertwining of that which is open and closed. As for the canvases of Petković, the riddle or ambiguity of the doorstep originates in their inter-space. There, a meeting is taking place between, on one side, the obscurity itself – an ingesting obscurity or the one that is created upon its proper diluteness or its absolute denseness, and on the other side, the physical traces and facture, the free handwriting or simply the liberally applied dreg.
#9 While looking, it is important for us to understand the form as a process of deformation or as a figure of perdition. A place where to see means to lose and wherein the losing object is not seeing, represents a place of weirdness (das Unheimliche) which on the other hand corresponds to the auratic image that Benjamin called “strange” (sonderbar) and “unique” (einmalig). With auratic objects, Freud’s Unheimlich reveals the powerful hold of the viewer by that which is looked upon. The object of disturbance is attracting us by obsessively mixing the attraction and uneasiness, because the condition of distress exposes us to a risk of not seeing it anymore.
The distress is disorientating. We do not know exactly what lays ahead and what is not there and whether the place we are taking our orientation from is inside. The disorientation of our view is separating us from ourselves, within ourselves. Thus we are held to ransom by the absent. This division in us (we look at and we are looked at) is initiated by the doorstep. We are between something which is in front of and something which is behind.
#10 In case we name the object of our observation as painting, then in front of the painting one is standing as if it were an open door which cannot be entered. We carry the space by way of our body and this space may solely appear within the dimension of the encounter: releasing it from the limitations, separating it from that which is here, from the visual closeness; concurrently, the space is presenting itself in that which is there, in an “opening” distance that allows to be opened respectively. The threshold between the memory and expectations, between that which already had met the ending and that which is yet to see the closure. Every painting is a doorstep that opens toward its deepness – retrieving it, retreating from it and attracting it. From the painting proper our gaze can discern the sorrow and the desire as it can simultaneously feel the time slipping by and its own perdition.