Green foliage, tall trees, glass facades and recurring staircases: What may appear like
everyday snapshots and unagitated encounters of anonymous personae set into floral
sceneries, is more intriguing and disturbing than meets the eye at first. The paintings
of Lidija Delić are inhabited by a range of objects and artifacts in environments not
further defined by coordinates in space or time. Non-individualized human figures walk
slowly up and down staircases, pausing, breathing quietly, observing the surroundings.
An unknown light source, whether naturally given or artificially introduced, casts
shadows. Yet there seems to be no wind, no instance of an outside that marks a
relationship to others. We quickly realize that the plants are the true protagonists of
this world, concentrated to and being kept save by versions of glass structures evoking
the image of biome domes or terrariums.
Rather than falling into classical categories of landscape or genre painting, the artist’s
works are sentient still-life histories, gesturing to scientific evaluations of liminal
states of climatic and societal collapse. The liminal in her works though is not to be
read as a waiting and waning in-between two poles, but as an activa – as opposed to
the silent contemplation of vitae contemplativae. This entangled contradiction, the
quietness of an active state permeating the canvases, evolves on perpetually chancing
temporal, spatial and emotional planes. While the wide formats are exhaling the air of
fruitful introversion, one portrait format, almost square, is making us hold our breath
due to its confrontational quality. A female figure in a black bathing suit stands tall,
life-sized, looking back at us. It is the only self-portrait Lidija Delić has painted to this
day and the only individual subject within the cosmos of this exhibition. The palette she
uses differs from the other paintings, being cooler, more intense, with blue hues and an
eerie feeling to it. Something about the landscape has shifted and the perception of
bodily representation with it – the self has altered its state. The artist’s body in this
altered state has become a symbolic one, in the dimension of Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan: an intangible, massive incorporation subsuming the concepts of society, the
nation-state and human-made, artificial structures. While the subject partially stands
in for such anthropocentric systematics, the incased nature is instrumentalized to play
the role of its opponent.
This correlation solidifies in a two-channel video work made accessible on a low height,
helped by a little Perspex bench. Animated by overlapping resonances of seagulls
screeching, drone-noises and ocean breezes, we are spinning slowly at 360° degrees,
catching glimpses of architecture in fragments and ruins as well as their takeover by
vegetation. We encounter a romantically beautiful scenery, wild again after no longer
being cultivated although not yet naturalized or fully recovered from human mingling.
It depicts an abandoned hotel complex in Montenegro – but what does this pointing to
a specific locality matter? Topography and time-zones are interchangeable, an in the
end, nature will prevail. What remains of a world is a biological force, most powerful in
its silent, steady evolution – still, life.
Many metaphors and words may comprise this inherent quiet that nurtures the works
of Lidija Delić. It is in tune with her ongoing fascination for the fictitious worlds of
James Graham Ballard, for speechlessness vis-à-vis topoi of an ever-expanding
fragmentation of worldviews since the post-structuralists entered the stage and for the
aestheticized endeavors of environmental safekeeping in movies like Silent Running.
Finding her inspiration in a pre-pandemic world and the sublime jungle of the Ford
Foundation Building’s courtyard in East Midtown Manhattan, New York, the artist has
made its uncanny existence her point of departure. The last words are far from being
spoken in these regards, but for now let us conclude with a gaze in the distance and
some insights through active contemplation:
„The sky got bluer and more blue and the green fresh banks of foliage were motionless in
the warmth, and the blocks of lights and shadow that bisected the streets were like the
eternal primordial shapes that lie on the faces of mountain ranges and seem to come from
inside them. They city was quiet and mostly empty to humans, so that it felt as though it
were itself more than human and could only reveal it when there was no one to see.”
–Rachel Cusk, Second Place, London 2021, p. 5.
Andrea Kopranovic, 2023
