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Jovan Balov presents his most recent paintings at the centre, portraits, acrylic on canvas. During the past two years, Balov has been widening his spectrum while focusing on painting. He transfers the analyses of his social environment onto canvas in the shape of hyperrealistic portraits, using acrylic. This succeeds the past few years when he used painting, video, installation - interpreted and synthesised things using his artistic skills and means. Soon he wrestled free of Northern American idols of Hyperrealism such as Chuck Close, the photo realist. His art focuses more on the painter’s means to create character studies rather than exaggerated reality. This is because he believes a portrait should, through the depiction of physical likeness, beyond human face expression, express the spirit and personality of the model.
Thus, his development starts with a portrait of his daughter Anna Marija, set in monochrome colours. The following portraits of his daughters Paula and Ena, as well as a small picture of a friend’s daughter, Ena Kamenkovic, show a playfulness between brown and Ochre, Siena and other earthy hues. His work on perspective continues in the portraits of his parents and above all, of his wife Doroteja, while disconnecting any link to Icon painting, which is well known to him from his Macedonian tradition. He plays with different views, like in his mother’s portrait and in his self portraits, mirroring effects and so on. He drives the play with colours on, as well as the plasticity, through exact use of perspective, in his two artists’ portraits of the 18th century Prussian sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch and the contemporary Berlin painter Wolfgang Petrick, using red for Petrick and yellow for Rauch to complete the monochromy. On top of this, he puts both painters’ names in versalia at the top edge (sic!) of each painting, as if to quote Hans Holbein the younger, who has created countless noblemen’s portraits in renaissance London.
After using pictures of living people that he took himself as models for his paintings, he now uses the classic cast of a sculpture, combined with his own eyes. Thus, the amorph material comes to life, even though the hair structure oviously point to the dead matter of a sculpture. Jovan Balov intends to push this on with a series of portraits of Johann Gottfried Schadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Adolph Menzel and Friedrich Drake. Of course, his portrait series is to be continued. For me, Jovan Balov’s portraits aren’t realistic or naturalistic copies, but they present this artist’s principle to unveil the analytically caused exaggeration of reality below the surface. His hyperrealism shows most clearly in the portraits, because he breathes life into them through his painting techniques, beyond all the inspiration photos, sculptures etc. could give him.
Berlin, May 2010 Rolf Külz-Mackenzie (English Translation: Petra Reinhardt)
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