Ljupka Deleva

The ideal work of art, therefore, would be a special meaning totality, however, because all meanings are essentially the same as no meaning such work is some kind of meaning vacuum. Hence, the work of art is more a certain starting point, ‘notion’, toward a ‘meaning totality’, which, for example, has been determined by David Bom as ‘inseparable, unbreakable, comprehensive and in permanent motion’.

Physiological meaning of the edge. The receptors, sensitive to light, tend laterally to inhibit themselves. The consequence of this is that they become relatively insensitive to the change of the overall lighting, and more sensitive to the marginal differences. Where the light suddenly changes, there the edge can be seen. In other words, we (under) take information for changes, while the sudden change brings much information.

(J. Damjanov, Visual Language and Fine Arts)

Before (or rather: in?!) the ‘installation’ of Ljupka Deleva, we exactly face the work of art that vibrates somewhere on the margins, between the edges of things which we can also call ‘media’, otherwise things very arrogantly frame-less, i.e. de-framed, recently, under the ‘deconstructivist attack’, acquiring porous margins and dripping edges, but somehow ‘framed’ (the ‘media’) in existences that are called ‘art’, ‘language’, ‘work of art’, ‘linguistic act’, ‘speech sign’, ‘installation’, etc. Hence, the porosity itself, in certain cases, becomes the one that essentially frames and defines the work of art as such. Precisely the game between the ‘conceived’ and its echoes in the silence (here is another title for the project of Deleva), outside the frame, is essentially that supreme, we can say, synaesthetic principle of art itself.

Here we have in action exactly that principle of double sensuous adventure (synaesthesis) caused by a (visual-auditive) stimulation, and exactly through that ‘inverted’ synaesthetic principle: by stimulating one sense, there appears a feeling in other sensuous area; the vocals of Deleva attempt not only to sound, but through that phantom and repetitive visual echo, they seem to gouge the ‘central emptiness’ of this work: the (non) presence of silence in the visual medium. Paradoxically, it (the ‘problem of silence’) is the most transparent (mostly auto-referential, say, if the intention and the consciousness of the artist is at all significant?!) aspect of the work, and this (the ambition to be descriptive in the ‘white zones’ of the metaphysical) precisely may be its small weakness. On other hand, also its strength is derived from here; hence the quality of the echo depends exclusively on the ‘synaesthetic fantasy’ of the listener-spectator, i.e. whether you will ‘hear’ the vocals, the silence or something totally third, own, nobody's.

What is rather not subjective (in a world of smashed ‘objectivities’) is the fact that we stand before an artistic handwriting well situated in the global contemporary matrices, a handwriting which knows to use the media; i.e., simply put, we face a literate voice, in times when the concept of literacy is revalued, and in space where the new ‘interdiscourse codes’, the new literacy, are yet to be learned, to which this work of Deleva (who performs by providing in a subtle manner, accordingly) gives its adequate contribution.