> Italiano

Liliana Radicevic



TESTO DI DUCCIO TROMBADORI.

Liliana Radicevic likes the short dialogue and the snapshot, because only in this way it seems to her be able to condense, without dispersing the sentimental content of expression. She was Fazini’s talented student. By the Old Pericle has been passed on her a revealing mark – a power to trace out the essential lines of mouvement in equilibrium. That is we can note in some profiles of the feminine body sculptures, improved upon a dim light, and also in her drawings that Liliana conceives as the emotions unraveled in stories, the occasions for the memory to evolve sometimes in a tale, sometimes in a parable.
Some points of wiew go beyond the outside forms, searching for the force lines and the flashes of light, in chasing of the magnesium light coloured sparkling glares.
There is a point of similarity between these paintings and the effect of a photographic shot in the middle of the night – the retina waits for the moment of the “lightshot”, then suddenly turns back to the original darkness. But, this is in the retirement of the light that the paint spreads out the canvas, covering the bright contrasts areas in the middle of the softened tones background, overlapping the matters, in a special effect produced by the mixed techniques. Two dimensions are never enough to organize Liliana Radicevic’s sentimental device, because she has her own gentle arrogance and she always prefers superabound in signs, in matters, in description.
As well as this kind of vision that proceeds by simultaneous and juxtaposed bursting lightnings, there is a singular patina, plain and simple, so the painting results essential however dense, sometimes even intentionally “touched” by a necessity to be succinct. Arabesques, garlands, animal stories and human beings’ loves have been composed in this collection of crystallized impressions having the privilege to maintain, inside the formal outlines, an intact potential of energy, as a casket of the vitality that could be given and preserved at the same time.
Such an intensive hand and mind activity offers us a delicious harvest of lines and colours, seemed to be broken and recomposed in a casual but intelligent disposition of tonal combinations, from grey to cold garanza red, from lacquer to ultramarine blue, from gold to black and white, these ones the cardinal elements in the passage from plane to space, from drawing to shaped figure.
In this way Liliana traces an appropriate autobiographic and existential diagram in a long story, where the mind pictures of her own life are organized as a fairy-tale, dissolved as a coloured vapour cloud floating through the hot and trasparent Adriatic summer, as she herself is; by her fanciful and constructive spirit, in a midway between the Orient and the Occident, the Slavonic nature giving the fruits in the Latin land.
Goethe’s sofa poetic esteem sounds also for Liliana – indication or announcement of an achieved style.




Duccio Trombadori


TESTO DI COSTANZO COSTANTINI

Painting is a destiny, said Matisse.
This may not bi true for everybody, but for Liliana Radicevic, it is. “You have more feeling for colour than for form” – the professors used to tell her at the Academy of Fine Arts of Belgrade, where she was admitted after surprising painting examination. Gifted with a restless temperament as well as with an acute consciousness of herself, the young aspirant artist replied: “But, I want to be a sculptor”. The fact is, rather than from, tridimensionality and volume she abandoned her masters and, winning a scholarship, instead to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Paris, she joined the Accademia di Belle Arti of Rome, where she began the course of sculpture. She was a little more than twenty, she was young, exuberant and perfectly convinced of what she did.
The italian capital gave Liliana a chance to meet an exceptional master, Pericle Fazzini, the former carver from Grottammare, whom Arturo Martini hailed as “the poet of sculpture”, the artist who saw transforme a rough wood piece in an airy, flying sculpture, as “The Boy with Seagulls”, whish caused a sensation. The student coming from Bjelovar, the small town of Slavonia, searching for her own identity as for the art secrets, took in from Fazzini uninestimable Nietsche, Rilke and Savinio. Her young hand was touched by grace, the same hand able to trace out the paper whitness and then realize the bronze vertiginous silhouttes and acrobatic circular feminine figures. Her sculptures were admirable for formal invention, elegance, balance – that miracolous equilibrium maintained, according to the artist, by Woman. She doen’s consider Atlas as a supporter of the world, but the Woman, as it is suggested by “Equilibrium”, the two pannels which introduce the exhibition.
Only, in Liliana’s mind there was an unsolved knot – a doubt about her truly vocation, the painting, the opinion mantained by her Belgrade professors, or the sculpture, or the junction of the both. So, the destiny brought her back the painting, her first denied love. The happy union of an innate talent with a stylistic knowledge, nobody knows where and from taken, has given as a result a series of paintings which amaze not only by their colours but even more by light they emit. Such the “Bloody Door” and “The Sun between the Arches”, two paintings recalling Kosovo, one of the most important historical centers of the orthodox religion, and the Balkanian war. The “Stairs over the Water” and the “Vertical River” represent the source of life, the life borning again from a catastrophe, the life running in never-ending rythm, up to the moment we are all just a shade. The extremely intense paintings dedicated to a famous lagoon city, as “Venice under the Rain”, meltingthe sea with the sky, while bridges, churches and palaces shade into evanescent halo, as a mirage. “The Bird of Paradise”, where the mytical bird claws the woman to bring her in some superior sphere, in the kingdom of beauty and eros. But as a painter, mindful of the lesson she was tought by Fazzini, Liliana Radicevic has gone further, beyond any reality. She has transmuted herself in a seagull, in a migrant bird flying over her own’s country landscape, rivers and seas, bridges of Novi Sad destroyed by the “intelligent bombes”, over Danube and Canal Grande, over the Naples sea, over the Tiber. She has become the wandering star in the spectrum of the contemporary art.
Hypersensitive, armed with some kind of transmental eye, Liliana works “ina jet” as requires the technique, action painting or dripping, transforming everystring she observes in a fantastic, surrealistic and metaphysical vision, expressed by a fan of colours never seen before, from white to grey and black in their finest variations and gradations, as in the “Naples Vision”.
Concerning this, we can remember the paintings on a sack-cloth, here also is present, conscious or incoscious, the mindful of the Fazzini’s lesson, the artist poor “ante litteram”, as Alberto Burri is, another “poor” artist so beloved by Liliana. The theorists trace the sources of a “poor art” in the second half of Sixties, although the art had already found the illuminated exemples in the works of both the painters, the last one able to transforme the most simple among materials in an artistic event, having perhaps on mind St. Francesco’s habit, the sign of his radical poverty.
Recording always “The Wayfarer and his shadow”, Liliana Radicevic approaches the most modern themes – the theme of double (“The Name of the Rose”, or the roses and their shadows), present not only in the contemporary litterature but also in any other kind of modern art, from Stevenson to Borges. The theme of eros (“The Bird of Paradise”), that she conceives, according to Plato teaching sas an expression of sacred in every human being, divine madness, fury of the soul, beyond and more than the explosion of the senses.
Beside the range of greys, Liliana’s paintings let us admire the red and the black, a homage to Stendhal, but expecially a record of the last war on the Balkans, wich destroyed one of the most important seat of the European civilization. If the black is the death and mourning, the red are the eyes of the “lords” of the war, of the masters of the planet, making contrast to the “Eyes of Art”. With the last one, Liliana Radicevic remember us that only the art, or the beauty, as said Dostoievsky’s “Idiot”, can save the world.




Costanzo Costantini