Che Bella Vista Panoramica
after Endi Poskovic

I was introduced to Endi Poskovic´s work during my research for my MA thesis. I was looking for artists from my region who are incorporating ukiyo-e, manga or anime in their work or those who do woodblock prints. To my greatest surprise my friend Adnan Dupanović told me about Endi and showed me his huge woodblock prints. As much as I was surprised by his work, I was more surprised by his background- a printmaker from Sarajevo (Art Academy), to have such pure approach to color and subject, is absolutely unthinkable. It was love on first sight. This was sometime in 2011. Since then we have started corresponding by email and we finally met in 2017. This pen pal email friendship does a great boost to my confidence as an artist and I am lucky to have that.

Sunny Day over the Bay in Orange and Blue with Cadmium Red print is my favorite. It has been wallpaper on my desktop for the last 10 years. It invokes in me a sense of tranquility. Strong bold outlines of clouds hold everything still, while animated waves below move. Zeppelin/rocket/torpedo is not zeppelin/rocket/torpedo, it is an alien object, an UFO, but in this case more ULO (Unknown Levitating Object), with black wireframe that holds strange mechanics run on color. Although an object is in perspective, a shadow it throws is two dimensional. We are witnessing a glimpse of scene from another world where different laws of physics reside, a glimpse of the Floating World. Are these prints a shared collective memory from subconsciousness? Something that I could only describes a memory from the video game (not movie or book) that you can share with your friend but it is not real, as both of you are referring to the same memory from the first person perspective, as something that has been done and experienced by you. So when I first got an idea of doing the Collaboration series of works with other artist for the benefit of the Foundation “Center Duga Art” I knocked on Endi´s door. I explained what I wanted to do and he said, pick whatever you like and do your thing.

My desktop as it is.

What I wanted is to dissect every line and deconstruct every shape, to find out its inner mechanism, how this machine works. I also added a little bit of my memory to it, and placed myself on an island with blooming cherry trees, framing a scene with blossom, a repoussoir that plays with three- dimensional composition of diorama´s panels. After all, it is a sunny day over the bay. You cannot guess dimensions because there is no point of reference. And with colors I wanted to go outside of flat regular color scale and metallic that I am accustomed to. I made florescent highlights that are only visible in the dark or under UV light, giving additional alien/magical dimension to the entire work. I changed the name to Che Bella Vista Panoramica as that is how I remember this work.

Technique: mixed media (acrylic on glass, PVC cel, canvas with wooden frame)

Size: 56,5 x 76,5 x 5,7 cm

Year: May 2021

Availability: In Collection of
Foundation “Center Duga Art”


Diorama

This series of kacho-e (pictures of birds, flowers and insects) is inspired by Japanese cel animation and tradition of omocha-e (kumiage-e) / tatebanko. Recently I have experienced a joy of painting on plexiglass surface and this very much reminded me of transferring drawing on animation cel and coloring it. When I received a set of cels from anime in 2016, I almost had a chance to make a composition of 3 layers of cels from Arcadia of My Youth: Endless Orbit SSX, but two got stuck together, and I couldn´t separate them without damage. I wanted to experiment a little bit with PVC cel. The second source of influence comes from tatebanko (ancient setting), 2.5D paper craft diorama, that originally comes from omocha-e (paper toy for children), that could be a print of board game to diorama setting – kumiage-e, popular in late Edo period. Kumiage-e (building up pictures) is ukiyo-e print that was sold as a set for diorama of kabuki scene and they originated from paper crafted scenes for kabuki theatre and toy theatre. Tatebanko is quite popular in Japan, and the scenes can be either very easy to build (featuring characters like Hello Kitty-chan), to really complex dioramas of buildings and houses.