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About Adam Cvijanovic and his art

Adam Cvijanovic doesn’t work from photographs, his invented compositions arise from the familiarity of internalised images. Using the same subject matter as Sassy Sally, Show Boat renders a smaller version of fairground aftermath. Painted in oil on board, Cvijanovic offers surrealism with a fixed visual logic. Set in a nowhere landscape, his festival remnants are made monolithic, each creating a sense of heightened spatialawareness via multiple vanishing points and extreme perspective. Rendered with the faded tones of American nostalgia, Cvijanovic envisions a ghost town of bygone delights and tawdry amusement.

Adam Cvijanovic’s third solo show at Bellwether Gallery by Katie Stone Sonnenborn

For Adam Cvijanovic’s third solo show at Bellwether Gallery, Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity), he has created two monumental paintings that hark back to the triumphant decoration of late eighteenth-century Rococo. Painted on Tyvek, the indestructible, fibrous, synthetic used for FedEx envelopes and house construction, the works are affixed directly onto the wall; it is a process the artist terms “mobile frescoes.” They are ambitious works and it is easy to understand why Bellwether’s Becky Smith has been trumpeting the show all summer.

For those who have followed Cvijanovic’s career at the gallery, it is refreshing to see the transformation of this adroit painter as he addresses increasingly complex compositions. Earlier large-scale murals tended towards straightforward subject matter—natural landscapes, newsworthy (but normal) scenes (baseball games, spring break on a beach, the launch of a space shuttle, etc.)—and their power and impact was a result of the scale rather than the scope of their content. Like many of the photo-realists, much of Cvijanovic’s work documents rather than deconstructs the conditions of contemporary American life, and while the verisimilitude is always engaging, there is often little beyond the feat of his execution.

The current installation, however, is pure imagination. It presents an unattainable situation made evident through the artist’s own musings, and it is vividly explored through a series of elaborate and detailed studies, one of which is also on view. In the front gallery, Cvijanovic evokes Tintoretto’s exultant heavens through a twelve-foot oval ceiling painting, Iolanthe (2005), where spatial boundaries dissolve in the illusionistic openings of the pale blue sky. Instead of clouds and angels, his is a scene of domestic disarray where a bed, linens, chairs, and the like float through space, propelled by unknown forces. It is neither frenetic, nor frightening, but rather more dream-like, as if the objects of one’s life could simply float away, and wouldn’t it be lovely to watch them go.

Philadelphia Story by Roberta Fallon

Adam Cvijanovic, who has been exhibiting since the mid-1980s and is now represented by Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn, is gaining increasing praise for large-scale, deftly done illustrational landscapes and other scenes, ranging from cowboys in the West to a beach thronged with young people (he was also featured in the traveling "On the Wall" exhibition organized last year by RISD Museum's Judith Tannenbaum). For his exhibition in Philadelphia, he was inspired by local history to produce two frescoes about the city's most famous utopian thinkers -- the Quakers and MOVE, the controversial "back to nature" commune.
Utopias are by definition doomed to failure. And the Quakers and MOVE never really achieved their respective goals of universal peace and a return to nature. So Cvijanovic's walk through Philadelphia history is a sad one. It's also more overtly political than most work by the artist.

Stemming from his former job as a commercial muralist, Adam Cvijanovic’s paintings combine pop kitsch with the gravitas of historical painting. Completely self-taught, Cvijanovic approaches painting with an unconventional process: using a variety of acrylic and latex household paints on Tyvek, his vast images become transportable frescoes, giant architectural interventions that can be remodelled to fit various gallery spaces. Subverting the utopian connotations of monumental painting, Cvijanivic’s tableaux embrace the serene and idyllic while portraying haunting scenes of desolation.

Read Entire Article about Artist Adam Cvijanovic paintings and artwork at The Saatchi-Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/adam_cvijanovic.htm

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View Adam Cvijanovic paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Adam Cvijanovic. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Adam Cvijanovic

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