During our training in the Academy of Fine Arts, my fellow printmakers and I were familiarised with the laws of typography, to equip us to make a decent layout of a printed text, enabling the reader to read without any effort.
Truth to tell, in my paintings I do not abide by these laws, rather I work in spite of the rules sometimes even against them. So instead of a line of optimal length, of 52 to 56 characters, in my work there will sometimes be more than a hundred. I do not try to put the correct spaces between the lines; in my work they will sometimes be so narrow as to prevent continuous reading of the text.
There is also no guarantee the text in one line will follow on from that in the preceding, for it is not my objective that the painting will be a reproduction of a given piece of reading matter; most often, my paintings are not a literally transcription. Sometimes I don’t use either diacritical or punctuation marks, for visual reasons. In this way, the semantic functionality of a big system is reduced to the advantage of the visual and artistic impression.
Paintings are, primarily, visual facts. As observers approach the work from a distance, at first they do not gather that they will be greeted on the canvases with rows of densely written letters, arranged according to some laws of their own, depending on which cycle of works we are concerned with. Then from some distance, they will notice images in which black and white vie for domination, see a play of geometrical figures, sometimes on the borders of Op Art and the like.
But moving closer to the picture at a certain distance what had previously seemed like a black or grey impenetrable surface will turn into signs of letters linked into words, sentences, arranged in lines that might fill up the whole surface of the painting. At that time the painting starts working at its textual level as well.
(2011; from the book “Pogled iznutra. Čitati s razumijevanjem” / “View from Inside. Close Reading”, Zagreb 2017)