Unfolded / Unfurled

INGÉNIEUR VANCY and VOJISLAV JAKIĆ

VOJISLAV JAKIĆ

The constant awareness of pain and suffering, whether physical, psychological, or existential, defines the work of Vojislav Jakic. It is a central theme of his 1970 semi-fictional autobiography, Homeless (Nemanikuce) and has found physical form in his early carved wood sculptures which incorporated skulls and bones, and is made graphically manifest in his sometimes massive drawings in ballpoint pen, crayons, and gouache on scrolls of paper which frequently depict ill-defined organic forms, monstrous embryonic beings, and swarming insects. In the most densely drawn works, overlapping and interpenetrating images of heads, insects, and animals compete in tightly packed compositions that leave little room to determine stable ground or depth. The works can be immense, many meters wide, yet the precisely drawn minute images animate the entire ground, suggesting an inescapable horrific, symbolic commentary on personal and contemporary life. 

Jakic was the son of an Orthodox priest from Montenegro who moved his family to Macedonia where Jakic was born. At age three, the child moved with his family to a small town in Serbia, where Jakic would spend most of his life, but would sense social antagonism resulting in part from the widespread tensions among the ethnically distinct peoples and regions within Yugoslavia, as well as antagonism to his father’s profession in the post-WWII socialist state. But Jakic was perhaps most haunted by death. At a very young age he lost both an elder sister and a younger brother to illness, and after his father died, the young Jakic lived in extreme poverty with his mother. Recognized early as an artist, he earned money by painting portraits of deceased villagers for their mourning families. Jakic went to art school in Belgrade in 1952 to study painting and sculpture, but inconsistently attended to his studies and after the failure of plans for exhibitions he returned home in 1957 to live with his mother. In 1962, he married for a short time, after which he returned again to life with his mother.

Jakic was a prolific artist, creating many thousands of drawings united by a distraught and often bitter sensibility challenging both the artist and his viewers. Fittingly, one of his works bears the inscription: “This is neither a drawing nor a painting but the sedimentary deposit of suffering.”

Charles Russell   https://www.outsiderartfair.com/artists/vojislav-jakic

INGÉNIEUR VANCY

Vancy is a self taught artist whose inner-vision is, as is often the case amongst such creative people, described as a “gift of god”. These, his ‘lost drawings’, hitherto unseen until now, demonstrate an unselfconscious line and near automatic vigour from which curious worlds emergege, cities, fantastic machinery; an internal universe of worlds of wild energy and fantastical skyscrapers built firmly upon the a substrate of Congolese culture.

Like many young Africans, imagination and invention was a tactile endeavour. The fabrication of toy cars, for instance was a practice found throughout sub-Saharan Africa in the latter part of the 20th century (and continues). In part it served the purpose of self-amusement, but also it created a barter or trading object. The toy racing cars fashioned out of cans, cigarette cartons and pieces of wood, for instance were marketed as far afield as Craft Caravan, the cult store in New York City in the 1980s and 90s as well as flea markets in other colonial centres such as Paris and Brussels. Vancy’s interaction with this rite of passage led him to embark upon an actual career in mechanics which did not suit his temperament and his introspective creativity diverged from dealing with steel, to creating representations of objects such as cars, factories of mass production and skyscrapers.

Un / Related 

A suite of works by CHRIS PYLE  & KAREL HAVLÍČEK 

KAREL HAVLÍČEK

Born into a family of artists, Karel Havlíček studied law and became a lawyer - a career he did not like. He spent most of his life in Kadaň, in northwestern Bohemia where he married and had three children. Havlíček worked for the Czechoslovakian government during World War II. When the situation became emotionally and morally impossible for him he resigned, a political decision that marked him the rest of his life. He began drawing at this time as a way of exorcising his emotional and spiritual conflicts. Working only at night, he followed a ritual reminiscent of automatic practices, working spontaneously without premeditation, as if overtaken by a spiritual force.

After 1948, he was forced to leave his job painting dishes in a ceramics factory to become a laborer. That same year, the Czech art critic Karel Teige, a major figure in the Czechoslovak avant-garde, became interested in him and planned to organize an exhibition of his drawings, a project crushed by the political authorities. This was a profound disappointment to Havlíček who died in 1988 before knowing the freedom that came about with the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

CHRIS PYLE 

An interview with Evan Evan Hughes

EEH: Chris, this is the second exhibition in Australia, and your works have come a long way. They are more complex, and the narrative has begun to take shape. Where has this energy come from?

CP: The work just goes where it takes me, rather than the other way around. I rarely have any preconceived ideas for an image. I work using an automatic drawing process in the beginning, and slowly the portraits emerge from that method. This body of work is twenty years old now, so more and more visual possibilities have taken shape over time and found their way into the work in a very natural, organic kind of way that adds to the complexity of the portraits.

EEH: The pandemic series is almost a standalone body of work, but somehow I have always felt that your figures speak to each other. How does the way a body of work forms for you reflect upon how each of your pieces interact?

CP: The images are definitely in a dialogue with one another. The image that I might be working on at the time is in dialogue with past and future portraits. It might be a curious analogy, but I look at the total body of work almost like a school yearbook in the way that the characters all relate to each other in a way, like classmates do, but can be stylistically similar, or stylistically very different, but all have unique personalities that somehow manage to come through.

EEH: Tell me a little about how you work and the process through which each of your characters develops their sense of identity.

CP: I have a small private studio in my backyard behind my home. I usually get started working at about 8 AM. I love working in the morning as I feel the most refreshed then. I work for an hour or two and then take a short break for my eyes. I usually repeat that pattern until about 4 PM. When I am in the creative process of outlining the images by drawing, I draw and erase over and over again (again, the Automatic method) until I reach the desired conclusion. While I am in this beginning drawing stage, I am also subconsciously thinking about the different texture and color choices that I might apply to the image after the outlining stage.

EEH: Your works are executed on the back of LP record covers. Does your background as a rock and roll drummer have any connection to your method and chosen materials?

CP: It’s a faded memory at this point, but I believe that I was compelled to draw one afternoon on the road and a ballpoint pen and torn LP jacket were what was available. There was always a box of ballpoint pens around because that’s what we made out the band's nightly set list with. It’s all a happy accident really and certainly not calculated. It just so happens that the pen and that particular paper surface react a certain way and give me the detailed line that I’m looking for. The fact that it relates to my identity as a musician is just a wonderful, random coincidence.

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