Ivan Stojakovic

Our featured artist this quarter is Ivan Stojakovic.
exert from an interview with Bridgette Mayer, Philadelphia, PA

BM: How did you start painting & become an artist?

IS: I have been painting with passion for color since my early childhood. I have also been extremely interested in natural sciences. Like most people, I was raised to think inside the box, so I decided to study computer engineering in college. I was good at it and I liked the creative aspect of computer programming. At the same time, I was painting and reading poetry and philosophy. The first year of college coincided with the break up of my home country - ex Yugoslavia. That hard event made me take a journey inside myself. During this journey I felt an urge to take a turn and pursue painting as a way of life and then also as a profession.

BM: What interests you visually?

IS: Lots of things: wild nature, wild science, wild technology, wild culture, and a completely tamed and developed civilization! And … quite frankly: beautiful women, which encompasses a lot of what I just mentioned. In a formal sense, I am very interested in rich surfaces, brilliant colors, unusual forms, organic as well as artificial structures and an uplifting ambient. I am very attracted to the blueprints of the cutting edge environmental science, genetics, nano-technology, systems theory, and digital technology. I am also interested in visualizing the 'inner logic' of life. As this inner world does not have an evident form, I have to seek for it through brainstorming and painting.
When I see art that tackles these things in a captivating way, then I get visually interested in that object/image at least as much as I am interested in the raw material.

BM: How long did it take to put together your new body of paintings?

IS: About 6 months. It was an intense period.

BM: What was your starting point for the show?

IS: Your demand for new work! In my studio, it was my last body of work and my image bank - a book with assorted cutouts from scientific magazines and printouts from the Internet.

BM: How have your cultural experiences shaped your work?

IS: My early education and cultural experiences happened in old Yugoslavia, under a breed of communism oriented towards the West, under multiculturalism and the state ideology of Dialectical Materialism. This political ideology advocates a religious belief in science. Ironically, I descend from a linage of 9 generations of Serbian Orthodox priests. The contrast between the material and spiritual, which I believe I inherited, is still haunting my work and myself today.

I lived in Belgrade, Toronto and now I live in New York. My experiences of nomadic life and a cosmopolitan global culture, made me more open-minded. So I try to keep my forms 'open', more abstract, and my stories open ended. Coming from the Balkans, where people are in touch with medieval sensibilities, I have always been attracted to the kind of Western art that explores medieval views, 'primitive' cultures and Eastern sensuality.
I have only lived in Western civilization and that's where I feel my art belongs.
In general, I feel that 'classical dramas' have been unfolding for centuries in our daily lives and our cultures: man vs. nature, and reason vs. myth, etc. I believe these classical conflicts are still in the core of our lives today. That's why I want to make art that is rooted in the classical conflicts; no matter how unorthodox and new it might be in its formal approach. And since the Western attitudes are pretty much behind the ongoing globalization, I feel an urge to create the kind of art that can answer to this contemporary condition.
Having seen a variety, I can't commit to a specific little detail and a narrow, repetitive subject matter in painting. Rather, I commit to wonderment about life as a whole, while traveling in circles through a range of the specific details and forms. This is my 'Odyssey'. I feel an urgency to create such poetics, in the time of narrow specialization and widespread superficiality. My practice is also highly specialized - that's unavoidable, but its specific purpose is to widen and deepen the horizons.
While I had a chance to experience some of life's murky as well as bright sides, which transcend political systems and national and cultural borders, I decided to concentrate on the beauty and on the 'cure' in my art, rather than on exposing illnesses of nature and humanity.

BM: What do you want a viewer to experience when they are in front of your paintings?

IS: First, I want them to have an experience of mind-body-spirit connection. If that happens, they might experience wonderment about the primordial vs. high-tech forms, and a beauty of information, and a beauty of their own inner 'distortion'. They might continue to wonder about scientific and technological advances in the context of global nature and culture.
Finally I want them to experience an ecstatic energy that expands consciousness. My paintings are meant to induce an uplifting energy and open unusual and spiritual states of consciousness, all during a healthy meditation in front of the image/object.

BM: What is most satisfying to you with your new show and body of work?

IS: I was able to sum up a lot of what I have been doing so far in different bodies of work.

Please contact the gallery for information on exhibition catalogue,
"Global Nature."