Samples & Sources: David Maljković

 

 Over the past few years, the exploration of painting as a medium—specifically its capabilities and capacity as a visual language—has become more prominent in the work of David Maljković. To be sure, the problematization of media codes and epistemological dispositions within painting, the abstraction of pictorial properties, and their transfer to different media realities are constants in Maljković’s art. Therefore, the presence of easel painting at an exhibition or the use of painterly procedures should not be viewed as a return or revival, but rather as a continuation of his poetic protocols. These protocols are, very generally speaking, aligned with the logic of deconstruction, which is based on the dissociation of various visual formations or entire sign systems (such as individual works of art, painting, architecture, scenography, etc.) from their essential properties, identities, and functions, reducing them to fragmentary, peripheral aspects of appearance. This remnant of form becomes a factor of the new symbolic reality that the exhibition somehow holds together.

 

 Similar principles are at work here. The exhibition at Dvir consists of several interconnected elements from different classes of objects. Maljković forms a loose spatial installation, supplementing paintings and drawings on canvas with large-formatted MDF panels, whose fronts are painted to suggest a kind of colour chart, and a direct intervention on the wall—another “painterly” colour palette, studded with ambiguous stucco accents. All these elements are objects held in tension by the multiple conflicting codes they carry...