Lacunae

oil on canvas
100 × 150 cm

In the painting “Lacunae” (2008), from a cycle of the same name, I wrote out lines with a hundred characters, and reduced the spaces between the lines completely. I didn’t use the usual spaces between words, nor did I use diacritical or punctuation marks, all for visual reasons. In the lines, however, here and there, there are white spaces or lacunae, in other words, omitted or “invisible” letters, even whole words.

When we look at the painting “Lacunae” from a quite large distance, it looks like a black surface made more dynamic by the play of short horizontals white “lines” distributed over the canvas. Coming up to the painting, we see that it is actually a light ground covered with lines of densely written black letters. I wrote out in order words from the “Dictionary of Foreign Words” that begin with a “k”. The reader who attempts to read the painting as reading matter will encounter difficulties and won’t be able to read more than 6 or 7 words in succession. As a rule the reader will automatically take the first syllable of the next word written out to be the ultimate syllable of the preceding, to which it does not belong at all, and “construct” a word that actually does not exist, a word without any semantic point. Apart from articulation according to meaning, “Lacunae” with its logic of full and void also defines the painting according to rhythmical organisation; as a kind of pulsing, or even of syncopation.

(2011; from the book “Pogled iznutra. Čitati s razumijevanjem” / “View from Inside. Close Reading”, Zagreb 2017)