What others said about my work

The works presented at the exhibition titled “Dreamless Night on Earth” have been emerging successively during the past half of a year representing the reflective and marking a ‘transformative’ period in the artist’s life. Recent personal traumatic events shifted her person, leading her to search and define herself (to ‘come to her senses’), while a single, intimate, and profound quest led her to the horizon of life and art. Believing in introspection she shook and spun that very horizon and shared with spectators the fresh records of personal life’s meanders and self-knowledge – a fruit of an often problematized passionate relationship between internal development and creation.

A Safari Hunt on Self

Motifs that have been imposing themselves to Jagoda, and that she used in building a visual symbolic narrative indicate traveling, safari and exotic – there is a map with landscapes, wild animals, a deer hide, a woman with a rifle… There is a sense of excitement, danger, brutality and uncertainty in facing the wild and unknown discoveries. Sporadically, the drawings are executed as light, primitive sketches, while at other times the expression turns to obsessively, minutely built symbolic representations – and with regard to these facts, we can divide the works into notes of certain processes, and archetypal static representations such as large-scale drawings on painting canvases. The complete registry of used symbols determines the nature of this journey as a safari hunt on self. The self – as an exotic primitive, wounded and banished from the natural habitat of her own.

From Brussels to self, the road is long

“What determines me?“ is the trophy question of this voyage, shaved into the deer hide. This skin of a wild creature is in fact the membrane of a living being, a particular referential point where everything exists solely outside of or within it. In the same way, the search for that static spot of personal stability progresses by feeling the space on the inside and out. Who and what defines me? Where is my/our center? Who am I and who are they? In regard to whom and what am I well, or in regard to whom or what am I unwell? Where on this map do I feel power and where am I powerless? “Map of Europe or Dreams without Dream” is the map of consciously accepted construct, the repetition of the myth that the center, the power, and the responsibility are found outside of self. A difficult life on the periphery of this territory is psychologically even harder because it negates its own importance and seduces into depression and self-oblivion. From the peripheral position, the helplessness multiplies progressively and as such, exhausts further.

Instinct, Passion and Peace

The exhibition ensued as the means of conscious articulation of psychological chaos. Jagoda started from symbols and exciting visual stimulants she planted into the course, the process, the fabric, the story. One of these stimulating images for the artist was an old photograph of her mother in which she is young and beautiful, while decisively aiming a shotgun. The piece “In my hands” represents a breaking point in the rhythm and flow of the exhibition as a part of the sequence of three monumental, iconic drawings executed on raw painting canvases. These drawings “Map of Europe or Dreams without Dream”, “Mountain Called Obsession” and “In My Hands” are fragile, but also of strong effect. A pale trace of graphite pencil on crinkled, “natural” canvases creates an impression that the messages these works carry are important, ancient – the archetypal messages of the unconscious. The fading and disappearing effect describes their existence in time even before they appeared in the mind of the artist. Hence, the motif of a woman holding a weapon, i.e. power and control, is both sobering and awakening.

Through the shot of a powerful woman the rhythm of the exhibition is broken, and the chaotic, low register of instinctive energy culminating in the video drawing “Survival”, is disrupted. The chaos of instincts carried by restless, interrupted drawings and moving images of hunting and mating, is cut off with a gunshot, being channeled and “cultivated” into the process of individualization. In the final instance, the artist is calm, letting herself engage into an “obsessive” construction of a drawing of a grand mountain range that, according to the Jungian analytical theory, can be interpreted as a path of personal development.

Marija Radoš, Remont, Belgrade

JAGODA MICOVIC GETS UNDERNEATH YOUR SKIN IN NEW EXHIBITION

Underneath Your Skin is more than just Micovic’s first endeavor in Brussels – all the works in the exhibition derive from her vision of the Belgian capital and a poignant emotional life.

Jagoda Micovic may be only 32 years old, but her artwork suggests a fascination with life and love, devoid of youthful cynicism and rebellion. Instead, a quiet melancholy emanates from her drawings, laden with deep emotions, at times expressed literally, through words. Underneath Your Skin will mark the first time Micovic exhibits in Brussels, and the material will be comprised of her newest works. Born in 1984 in Belgrade, Serbia, Micovic obtained her PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade (AFA). Even as a young painter and illustrator, she was the recipient of several awards, and an acknowledged artist, who honed her skills in Thessaloniki and Düsseldorf, respectively. To date, her works have been exhibited around the globe on more than 40 occasions, with eight solo exhibitions. Underneath Your Skin is more than just Micovic’s first endeavor in Brussels – all the works in the exhibition derive from her vision of the Belgian capital and a poignant emotional life. In her own words, Micovic found inspiration during long walks through the city of Brussels. A peculiar detail she points out is that inspiration didn’t come in bouts – it had been ever-present, both in the daylight and at night. It is this obvious, yet supple dichotomy that drove Micovic’s creative energy – her new work features all the delicacy and naïveté of daydreaming, but also the solemn, emotionally charged self-doubt the night brings into most people’s emotional lives. Micovic presents all her illustrations as if they were an elaborate dream, daydream or nightmare. She intertwined the buildings, roofs, sculptures and other objects comprising the Brussels scape, with her private, inner space of feeling and being. “Intimate, sometimes unexpected scenes, are the wave through the deep blue colors marking the contrast between private and public,” said Micovic

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DAYDREAMING DRAWINGS OF THE ARTIST JAGODA MICOVIC

Inspired by the creativity of the artist and writer Henri Michaux, especially his poetic work “Landscapes”, as well as the chapter “Intimate immensity” of the book called Poetics of Space, by the French writer Gaston Bachelard, the artist Jagoda Micovic has reviewed landscapes and areas of her memories using the techniques of drawing

According to some theorists, reminiscence, i.e. memories, is the most complex human creation, that we have created to protect ourselves from the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the impossibility of resuming the moments and events that took place in it. Although fragile and vulnerable, memories can move us and put us into a trance, but also seduce us as a craving for what might have happened. However, the one who has once begun to open the array of memories never reaches the true end of its segments. “None of the pictures satisfies them, because they saw that the spectrum can be spread, and that the truth is only in its folds.”

Therefore, the author artistically presents themes of reminiscence, remembrance and memories in her drawings as a poetic metaphor of the landscape , which is emphasized by the titles of works, in which “landscapes are placid and desperate”, “areas obstruct the screams and stop the tme”, “landscapes are being pulled over the head like sheets” … Except on the memories, Jagoda Micovic based her drawing presentations on personal memories and imagination, creating spaces of intimacy, in which her thoughts, memories and dreams are intertwined. By the display of selected artistic details, the artist yields to fantasies through a drawing technique which owns both metaphorical and imaginary character. So, with the help of a surreal, poetic “detail”, which gains an advantage over the real presentations of the “entirety”, Jagoda Micovic shows the worlds of artistic imagination in her drawings, which help to experience “big” in “small”: “>Big< comes from >small<, not according to a logical law of the dialectics of the contradiction, but through liberation from all dimensional obligations, that is precisely the characteristic of imaginative activities.”

Although they speak the language of space and landscapes, drawings of the artist Jagoda Micovic “do not want”’, but also “can’t” be measured in reality because they change their dimensions immensely. Immensity in the works of this author refers to the infinite meanings of her poetic drawing views, which draw us to daydreaming, too. ” Immensity is, one might say, a philosophical category of daydreaming … Immensity is within us … We dream in one immense world … Immensity is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.”

Svetlana Bojm, Budućnost nostalgije, Geopoetika, Belgrade, 2005, p. 66.
Henri Michaux,”Landscapes”, in My properties, Nolit, Belgrade, 1976, p. 155.
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of the Space, Gradac, Čačak, 2005, p.150. Ibid, p.173, 174.

Olivera Erić, Curator FLU Gallery

The painter of strong motivation, for starting point she has an incredible theme: psychophysical states through which passes the individual in a times of great personal events. Exploring, she have done the cycles “White Nights, “Other state“. Dealing with inner-self, “abrupting herself”, she helped the others in revealing the deep personal secrets. The images have spiritual, pyramidal stratification, with intriguing theme (perfectly simple) set realistic, and with the help of precise and secure line and refined natural coloration we are stepping into another spiritual level, more contemporary, where trying to solve what started, by symbolism, by details above the accented coloration, accented by pure colors. With the help of allowable whiteness that is the mark of safety, courage, and make space for silence, reflection, pause … we find vent in it, release and dismissal of initiated, in which are condensed great emotions and the drama of surviving. It would be said “tell a spacious thoughts”… As deep inveteracy in personal, also has deep significance and faith in the art as magic, with which the painter stands in defense of women identity. The power of art is to approve and tolerate swimming of all styles in uncertain waters of painting, but the final point has to be justified.

Verica Tomović, Art historian

…sensitive, introspective, in authentic way looking at the model of traditional comprehension, wheeling and dealing with beauty, the visual artist Jagoda Micovic in “Beautiful as God – the ideals and the forms of beauty in our tradition” contemplates the complex and complicate position of male, as central figure of obsessive engaging of human perfection. Combining authentic confessions of our mothers and grandmothers about aesthetic beautification of the newborn child, with witty idealization of young married couples and aquarelle whose narrative is based on personal memories and reconsideration of the ideals of love and beauty, the artist creates her opera made of reflections, lucid quotes, soft irony miniatures, and subtly, easy reading, symbolism.

Jagoda Micovic in original way treats almost controversial topic of traditional apprehension of beauty, which is the thesis of her doctoral-artistic dissertation, but its also the personal interest dictated by her origins and the system of values she grown up in. The easiness she plays with, using different artistic medias, suggests creative plenitude of already formed artist. This, atypical treatment brings to the new opus of Jagoda Micovic’s art a certain three-dimensionality and special expressivity. Using the fairy tale and myth, proverbs and lullabies, documentary materials and installation, is very carefully fused to this unusual creative kaleidoscope. As mothers from rural places of Montenegro massage the face and tight the legs of newborn child, refining it to “perfection”, Jagoda Micovic is shaping her opera, striving to create of it the “ideal” picture of the subject in the individual mirror of self-realization.

Tamara Ognjevic, Art historian and literate, Artis Centre, Belgrade

Jagoda Micovic develops her own visual and literary scenario and contemplates about her new role as mother and wife. We can observe the main characters of her drawings as archetypical role holders of father, mother and child. They make the nucleus of this family story placed in a home ambiance, with some furniture, child cradle, mirror, fragments of carpet or curtain. The ambiance full of whiteness, undefined interspaces, those undrawn and undiscovered, which indicates new experiential field of intuitively introspection of relations established by forming a family and coming a new being on the world. The spiritual layer, visible on Jagoda’s drawings, was communicated by special artistic manuscript: iconic appearance, very often reversed perspective, swinging, almost surrealistic drawing of undefined fragments, etheric body parts, of hybrid allying and overlapping. The story that prints its effects to the material plan, very often takes place on subtle, emotional, spiritual levels and its up to us to make a contact with that sphere. The art is great intermediary, exceptional medium of insight, with possibility to appear that is invisible.

Maida Gruden, curator, KCSG

How deep is the water,
How high is the sky,
How deep is that love you said was mine?¹

Once upon time, in a land far away, a man and woman loved each other. They got a child and a cradle that looked like an aviary. Everyone had wings. Mom, dad, and a baby. They loved each other and their love did not fade by time, nothing faded. On the contrary. By time, their love became so strong. Unbearable. Late Night Tales are small and big loves. Created in Dusseldorf, far away from gloomy everyday life, those Jagoda’a intimate notes overgrew diary sketches, postcards, temporal and spatial frames. Fairytale hunches of wild youth and reckless maturity were written by small letters in the corners. Lullabies for all our desires are put behind the cradle in order not to disturb Dreamy life of angels². Melancholy³ is ephemeral (doubt, insecurity, unrest and discomfort are hidden behind an armchair with blue flowers). It is replaced by the juicy meetings of united bodies, burning out because the option of transposed existence of experiencing the world in two. So, in the foreground, there is love that remains the only force. A subjective force. “One of the few experiences where, starting from the case registered in the moment, we are experiencing the possibility of eternity.” Just like in a fairy tale, but not always with a happy ending.


1. How deep is the water, Dead Brothers
2. Dreamy Life of angels, Eric Zonca, 1998 Dreamy Life of angels, Eric Zonca, 1998
3.Melancholy, Lars von Trier, 2011
4.Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, The Praise of Love, Adresa, Novi Sad, 2012

Jelena Spaic Curator, Flu Gallery