Appropriating the structural systems, perspective and spatial logic of Renaissance frescos, Adam Cvijanovic moves the medium of painting back to the realm of architecture and classical allegory. His paintings are on Tyvek, a material midway between paper and fabric, and are exhibited attached to architectural structures or directly to the building, creating a temporary site-specificity (for they can be removed and repurposed). Highly illusionistic scenes, typically on a grand and enveloping scale, shift the viewer in place and time.


Cvijanovic's installation for this exhibition rests upon classical mnemonics, later developed by the Renaissance thinker Giulio Camillo Delminio whose L'Idea del Theatro (1550) described an encyclopaedic memory aid in the form of an amphitheatre with hundreds of images arranged over seven tiers. This approach maintains that places, real or schematic, may be used as an ordering framework to trigger memories of extended concepts too complex for the capabilities of normal recollection. A sequence of rooms, for example, may each be given an emblem to represent a passage of a text that, when viewed in the appropriate order, would facilitate the recollection of the complete construct.


A similar system was employed by Giordano Bruno, and may have formed a part of Shakespeare's original Globe theatre.
What is notable about the memory theatre, and what it shares with Cvijanovic's work, is that it follows the idiosyncratic nature of memory itself and allows each symbol and reference to mean something different to each user or viewer. Cvijanovic has presented four paintings each mounted to a side of a cube, approximately four metres square. Each of the four scenes, a ramshackle studio space gradually moving into a vast ocean scene in the background, a concrete floor with a star-lit sky above, a mundane, dilapidated green couch placed against a barren Mediterranean landscape, and finally an epic waterfall, is loaded with Classical reference. The foregrounds of the first three are rooted in the familiar, the everyday, perhaps alluding to the conscious world. The backgrounds slide into the mythical and even spiritual. Yet the ease of the journey from one place to the other takes this a step further, promoting a game of free association in the subconscious that owes a debt to the strategies of the Surrealists.


As well as being a tool to memorise concepts, the memory theatre existed to facilitate spontaneous creativity, something Cvijanovic's paintings also achieve. The randomness of the disparate objects the artist presents not only alludes to the fragmented processes of narrative construction but allows us to reconfigure them as we navigate its structure. As the images are arranged over four adjacent surfaces, it is impossible to see all sides of the puzzle simultaneously and nearly impossible to see an image in isolation. To view and move around the cube is to open up the possibilities of multiple readings as images and concepts collide and float freely from one another. To navigate the structure and release its numerous formulae is the equivalent of your hands turning the multiple facets of a Rubik's cube. LS

[LESS]
Appropriating the structural systems, perspective and spatial logic of Renaissance frescos, Adam Cvijanovic moves the medium of painting back to the realm of architecture and classical allegory. His paintings are on Tyvek, a material midway between paper and fabric, and are exhibited attached to architectural structures or directly to the building, creating a temporary site-specificity (for they can be removed and repurposed). Highly illusionistic scenes, typically on a grand and enveloping scale, shift the viewer in place and time.


Cvijanovic's installation for this exhibition rests upon classical mnemonics, later developed by the Renaissance thinker Giulio Camillo Delminio whose L'Idea del Theatro (1550) described an encyclopaedic memory aid in the form of an amphitheatre with hundreds of images arranged over seven tiers. This approach maintains that places, real or schematic, may be used as an ordering framework to trigger memories of extended concepts too complex for the capabilities of normal recollection. A sequence of rooms, for example, may each be given an emblem to represent a passage of a text that, when viewed in the appropriate order, would facilitate the recollection of the complete construct.


A similar system was employed by Giordano Bruno, and may have formed a part of Shakespeare's original Globe theatre.
What is notable about the memory theatre, and what it shares with Cvijanovic's work, is that it follows the idiosyncratic nature of memory itself and allows each symbol and reference to mean something different to each user or viewer. Cvijanovic has presented four paintings each mounted to a side of a cube, approximately four metres square. Each of the four scenes, a ramshackle studio space gradually moving into a vast ocean scene in the background, a concrete floor with a star-lit sky above, a mundane, dilapidated green couch placed against a barren Mediterranean landscape, and finally an epic waterfall, is loaded with Classical reference. The foregrounds of the first three are rooted in the familiar, the everyday, perhaps alluding to the conscious world. The backgrounds slide into the mythical and even spiritual. Yet the ease of the journey from one place to the other takes this a step further, promoting a game of free association in the subconscious that owes a debt to the strategies of the Surrealists.


As well as being a tool to memorise concepts, the memory theatre existed to facilitate spontaneous creativity, something Cvijanovic's paintings also achieve. The randomness of the disparate objects the artist presents not only alludes to the fragmented processes of narrative construction but allows us to reconfigure them as we navigate its structure. As the images are arranged over four adjacent surfaces, it is impossible to see all sides of the puzzle simultaneously and nearly impossible to see an image in isolation. To view and move around the cube is to open up the possibilities of multiple readings as images and concepts collide and float freely from one another. To navigate the structure and release its numerous formulae is the equivalent of your hands turning the multiple facets of a Rubik's cube. LS