Upon walking into a silent, sunlit room dominated by Ljiljana Blaževska’s images, the effects begin almost immediately. Symptoms may involve confusion, loss of vocabulary, and, in extreme cases, visual hallucinations. The symptoms may be particular to tourists in Italy unaccustomed to the climate and the way some Italian cities are uniquely stuffed with ancient art and artifacts, but I have collected several corroborating casual observations from others who have seen Blaževska’s work. Those of us who get it describe our symptoms with glee.
At first glance, Blaževska’s paintings could be mistaken for recent trends in figuration. But take a step closer, and it’s clear that these works came from a place that does not exist in today’s global communications environment. There’s nothing sardonic, no references to pop culture, no try-hard striving for provocation. In essence, there is no internet, but it does have hints of what many young painters seem to have been yearning to do for the past few years.
The symbols are confounding, and seem almost impossible to place in any known history, thereby raising intriguing questions. When I post photos of the paintings online, I get a flurry of responses: Who made these? Where do they come from? “Ljiljana Blaževska, a Serbian painter who died in 2020 at age seventy-six,” is my only response.
I’m not just being evasive. Further information about Blaževska for the English-speaking world is scant at this point. We know she was born in Macedonia, then moved with her family to Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia when she was eleven years old. She completed postgraduate work at the Fine Arts Academy of Belgrade in 1969, and although she had developed her unique style and mythology by the time she graduated, it seems she never stopped studying painting. She attended prestigious European residencies and was a longtime member of the Serbian Fine Arts Guild. Yet her continued study does not seem to have impacted her style much. Looking at work created between 1969 and 2000, it is difficult to register any dramatic changes in technique or subject matter.
15 Orient has put twenty paintings spanning thirty-one years of Blaževska’s career on display at a nineteenth-century palazzo in Soleto, Italy, a small city in the province of Lecce. In this one-time, off-site setting, the muted colors of the palazzo’s rough limestone plaster complement the painter’s palette in a way that further immerses us in the atmosphere of Blaževska’s unique, fantastical world. (From another perspective, the large rooms with cathedral ceilings—some with frescoes depicting their own traditional mythological scenes—may cause distraction.)
When I previewed the show, I saw many paintings that are not presently on display. Feeling fully immersed in Blaževska’s world, perhaps in part due to the sheer amount of painting in the space, I experienced a hallucinatory effect. One work that is not currently hung, Vulkan (1969–89), serves as a good example of how the work exerts itself on the mind, with its faint figures camouflaged against atmospheric backgrounds, made using a painterly material that creates a metallic sheen in certain lights.
Standing a few steps back from the medium-sized paintings, approximately sixty centimeters square, I see a cyclops bride with long blue hair blowing up above the small of her back. Her gown is unusual. It is nearly transparent aside from what looks like a violet cage bustle, or maybe just a cage. Most of her legs are visible, but there is fruit (or decorative orbs of some type) stuffed around her upper thighs. A subtle blue and orange cyclone swirls around her stomach, and she holds an autumnal bouquet at her breast. The bride stands under the outstretched wing of a priest adorned in peacock feathers who is mostly featureless aside from a bugle-shaped beak that emits grassy-green rings of vapor. The peacock priest wears a floral crown, and a halo around his head stretches over his hovering wing. There’s no figure under his left wing, and no halo above it. Under the left wing, where I would expect to see a groom, is a small patch of colorful, impressionistic hillside in the distance. At the bottom of the hill, what looks like a village center is seen from a perspective that is nearly directly overhead, which implies that the ceremony in the foreground is occurring near the edge of a cliff just outside of town. To the left of the bride, two figures with wheels for feet carry a giant teardrop-shaped gourd that is dark brown with black splotches, suggesting rot or disease. Glowing pink, purple, white, and blue thorns stick out from the gourd’s bulb. Whatever the men on wheels are carrying, it appears both diseased and festive.
Behind the priest and bride, a road leads toward the sky with arrows pointed upward. This road could also be taken for a volcano, given the painting’s title, and it would lead to what would be the painting’s natural vanishing point if the perspective was not disoriented by the overhead view of the village and a tumultuous body of water in the background. The water could be a giant wave, or a river that defies gravity, as it rolls across the horizon and under the road.
Taking a step back to snap a quick photo, I see on my screen that the priest’s halo is glowing, as if I’d taken a picture of polished gold under the bright sun. I put my screen back in my pocket to look at the halo from different angles. I notice that in some lighting conditions, the halo radiates a golden hue, while at other times it is invisible. I find other disappearing objects on the canvas. The sky is a sfumato of browns, and there is a flaming sun sinking into the rough sea. The sun, like the gourd, looks both festive and diseased. A patriarchal, expressionless face looks down from the left corner, over the sun. At the upper right side of the canvas, I notice for the first time two very faint floating monsters, perhaps camouflaged as clouds, with red eyes and snarling mouths.
It is extremely difficult to photograph Blaževska’s work in any satisfactory way because some figures and symbols are so faint, they appear ephemeral from certain angles. It seems the disappearing trick is intentional, and a vital component to the experience of the work. So, even if the painting is captured in a light that ensures everything is visible, the experience of the work through photos alone will be lacking this vital element.
Looking around the room, I thought I saw some of Blaževska’s disappearing monsters flickering in the air. I exclaimed with a laugh to the only other person in the gallery, “I think I’m hallucinating.” I explained what I experienced in more detail, and the person said, “No, that’s valid, I’m getting that too.”
By skewing the traditions of perspective, Blaževska creates a feeling of boundlessness where figures stand among amorphous landscapes, with pieces of architecture that appear in impossible spatial interrelation. Her paintings flow into one another. Standing in the gallery, I found myself captivated by the fleeting figures concealed amid phosphene-like backgrounds. After studying a painting, the simple act of rubbing your eyes and glancing around the room easily tricks the mind into envisioning ethereal figures floating in the surrounding air.
If given the chance to visit Soleto before the show closes, I recommend treating the palazzo and the painting exhibition as two separate experiences. But please take in as much of Blaževska’s work as possible. Opportunities to do so are precious and rare.
at 15 Orient at Palazzo Carrozzini, Soleto
until August 8, 2023
Ljiljana Blaževska was born in 1944 in Skopje, Macedonia. At the age of 11, Blaževska moved with her family to Belgrade, Serbia, the capital of what was then the federation of Yugoslavia, where the surrounding cultural atmosphere was more central European in influence.
In 1969, Blaževska completed her postgraduate work in the painting department at the Fine Arts Academy in Belgrade, where she studied in the class of the famed Yugoslav painter Ljubica “Cuca” Sokić. By the early 70’s, she had already discovered the formal and thematic lineaments of her unique painterly world.
Over the course of her career, Blaževska’s work was featured in upwards of 20 solo exhibitions and countless group presentations throughout Yugoslavia. She was a long-time member of ULUS (the Serbian Fine Arts Guild) and the recipient of numerous awards for artistic achievement. Blaževska took part in numerous residency programs throughout Europe and in 2008, participated in the Cité International Artist Residency in Paris. In 2021, Blaževska’s work was the subject of a solo-exhibition at 15 Orient (New York) and in 2022, a solo-booth at Frieze Masters with Alison Jacques Gallery (London).
Forrest Muelrath is an American-born poet, writer, and critic. Since 2010, his writing has been published by BOMB, e-flux Criticism, Lacanian Ink, ExPat Press, Hobart Pulp, and others. A fascination with the relationship between language and images led him to sound design. As a sound designer, he collaborates with his partner to produce video art that has been exhibited by institutions such as MMCA (Seoul), Kebbel-Villa, Rijksakademie, and the Whitney Museum. Forrest's online presence can be found through his personal website, www.forrestmuelrath.com.