Aleksandar Radičević makes drawings that implicate the viewer before the viewer has had a chance to form an opinion, and the discomfort is entirely intentional. NEMAN. ČEKA., on view at Galerija SULUJ through May 30, presents a body of drawings that carry the same energy they were made with: immediate, unplanned and completely irreversible.
The exhibition occupies the rooms of SULUJ's apartment-style space on Terazije with an installation logic that is itself a quiet argument. In the first room, a grid of pen drawings on paper, clipped with binder clips to the white wall in three rows of six, arranged with the cool precision of someone who has spent considerable time deciding exactly where chaos ends. Through the doorway, a second room offers a different register entirely: irregular pieces of unprimed paper pinned directly to the wall, each one cut into an organic shape that suggests something between a cloud, a wound and a continent, their surfaces animated by loose figurative lines in green, red and yellow ink, bodies half-formed and half-dissolving, refusing to commit to either figuration or abstraction with any real conviction.
This formal division is not incidental, it is the whole point. The title announces a binary that the work then spends its entire runtime complicating: neman, the self-organizing creature that surfaces from the mind's automatic activity, and čeka, the hunting term for a concealed position from which one watches and waits and ultimately decides when to stop. Radičević draws by following the material rather than directing it, each line generating the next without prior intention, and the čeka enters only at the moment when the drawing has said what it needs to say, which is also the moment the artist reclaims the role of editor.
Looking at the pen drawings up close, the range of density across the grid becomes the most compelling thing in the room. Some sheets are so saturated with figures, limbs, creatures and overlapping gestures that the eye has nowhere to rest, a kind of visual overcrowding that reads less like composition and more like transcription of a very busy mental state. Others are almost bare, a few tentative marks scattered across the surface with the diffidence of something that arrived and then thought better of it. What holds them together is the unmistakable quality of a hand that has learned to get out of its own way, which is considerably harder than it sounds and considerably rarer than it looks.
The shaped paper pieces in the first room feel like the wilder half of this conversation, less disciplined by the grid and more willing to sprawl, their color introducing a warmth that the monochrome pen drawings deliberately withhold. Pinned directly to the wall without frames or pedestals, the whole exhibition carries the feeling of a working method made visible rather than a resolved body of work presented for judgment, which is either the most honest thing a drawing show can do or a very elegant way of making incompleteness feel intentional. In this case it reads as both.
NEMAN. ČEKA. runs through May 30 at Galerija SULUJ, Terazije 26/II.
by Irina Rusinovich