Metamorphosis or Searching for Lost Aura
In her latest series of works in polyethylene foil, called Membranes, Vera Stanković has broadened her investigations begun in paintings. Having formerly chosen sculptures as the subject-matter of her paintings, she had only seemingly entered the world of figures. The painted backs of the busts of Chinese terracotta soldiers kept the anonymity of the typological pattern, as well modeled module, a member of a given corps. The view of their backs and the backs of their heads revealed only the tension of the shoulders, suggesting the movement of the figure. The real visual experience or the face of the picture was the back side of the figure as the background on which Vera Stanković registered, in her expressive personal language, the radiation of the aura of some former life and piece of art embodied in the Chinese terracotta soldier. During a period of reconstruction in the Archeological Museum of Athens she saw ancient sculptures wrapped in nylon foils for protection. This encounter was the crucial moment in her career and in deciding upon her future subject-matter. These sculture vellate that emerged and disappeared under the layers of their nylon wrappers, helped Vera Stanković to define her need for spatial articulation of the intriguing states or events from the borderline of the External and the Internal. Instigated by the folds of the pleated nylon that covered the sculptures, she began her search for a membrane, for a state of osmosis when the exterior transforms into the interior turned inside out. In order to realize these borderline states, the artist chose nylon bags and joined them together into different structures by thermal interventions (burning). The form of the first constructions, membranes, was reminiscent of a nucleus or a body enwrapped in them. Later she made free forms, subtly referring to their preexistence. The process of this materialization of the aura can be compared to the interest certain Renaissance masters in true representation of the clothes. Their studies of the draperies were focused on the texture and the weight of the material and the way it captured or reflected the light. Fabrics drawn or painted in such a way turned into the scenic elements; when they consistently followed the underlying body, Chastel called them “humanized”, or “inhabited” draperies; on the other hand, in their manniristic flutterings the critics were able to recognize the first examples of geometric abstract painting.
The open structures of Vera Stanković, the uninhabited draperies of the creased, wrinkled, burnt nylon do not resemble bodily wraps; their plastic existence and individuality is realized through autonomous draperies, light, swaying, transparent, seductive and dangerous in their artificiality and indestructibility; they spread in all directions,increase and decrease; conquering the surrounding space they turn into the foam crests of waves, feathers, spider webs, transparent shadows, elusive like the water or the air. Every flow of air causes a metamorphosis of the form and the state, or the relationship between the light and the shadow, while the gentle rustling suggest some other life, that flows through the warmth accumulated in the seams of the segments.
Bojana Burić