Georg Redzek belongs to the generation of artists who were educated and brought up during the eighties , the age of general orientation of exploring ( art history, religion and literature), a very ambitious project – experiment of reconciliation of art and life, strenghten neoexspressionism and emphasized subjectivity. Part of the atmosphere full of numerous topics, ways and disciplines where everything is allowed and possible, is transmitted both to the following decade, which will, in relation to the previous one, revise the ways of thinking, understanding and experience both in the world of reality and the world of art. Forming the slow , but at the same time profound change in the artistic perception and behaviour, is something that significantly determined Redzek's later work.
His first public appearance was at the end of eighties, right after the graduation from the Art Academy in Novi Sad. Apart from the affirmative opinion of his solo exibiting performances during the nineties, people noticed that the constitutive elements of Redzek's picture have their point of departure in the fine arts' milieu of previous decade, since its formal and structural characteristics stand on the border line of new picture/performance from the eighties. Recognition of these characteristics still does not hinder the status of this painting at the present time, ie the last decade of the century, with all existing conotations (political, economical, social and cultural) in every day environment which is full of inexhaustible stimuli of all kinds. His vital, ecstatic and expressive painting draws its strength and energy directly from actual life, its own experience and ackuired knowledge. That would be the only problem entry where we should lock for causes for some more outstanding and some more developed characteristics of Redzek's painting.
By emphasizing messages which reflect things or phenomena or living creatures though groteskue apparitions and accumulated sights, entangled actions and events, fed by symbolism of infuriated, divided, disoriented world on one side, and joyous faith and houpe in the events as taken from childern's imagination, on the other. Spectator-participant has a space for projecting his own experience. Portraiture of reality, anonymous figures and environment, gentle and poetic like in Shagal's dream areas, motives from the surrealistic fundus,(un)disguised erotic topics, Bosh's esthetics of irrational, dramatic contradiction of realistic and imaginary all that is followed by a vivid movements of substance, by intensified pulse of colour and from, change and simultaneous shift of lightess and darkness.
This particular artistic anamnesis of global society originates from the intellectual temperature which records the state in the way it has been experienced, with necessary but minimal filtration, without disinfection and sterilization. (Self) observing and listening attentively to positive turn, which is personal but at the same time universal, where humanistic feelings and strivings would stand against egoistic and monstrous ones, against alienation, anguish and insanity is confronted to the "Millennium paranoa"and a real threaten of thereaten of frightening culmination.
On the occasion of the latest Redzek's solo exibition, which was held in the Ghallery of Kolarcev Narodni Univerzitet in Belgrade, in 1995. Sava Stepanov noticed the following "it is the process of an arbitrary cleansing the motif of the picture and gradual calming down the expressive tension". Although the style of Redzek's pictures has not been seriously changed since then, indications of linguistic moves are legible trough different, reducend application of oormal and fine arts' elements, but at the same time the narrative content has been preserved like "an implication of dreams and subconsciousness. "Redzek stopped at the trail of the new approach in order to recapitulate everything that has been overcome and established. That is the reason for choosing the pictures that have been made for the last few years and the pictures that have already been exibited. As a matter of a fact a certain summary/review hasbeen made,like a small,personal glance backwards, so that bz abridging and condensing he would be able to provoke a situation in which synthesis precedes the analysis, a situation which will enable the moves that are follwing.
Redzek's declarative devotion fowards "showing" painting, conditionally forwards a figuration, still has been rechecked. A certain turn has been announced as a possibility, and whether it would be, and if it would, how it would be developed, would depend on numerous circumstances both interior and outer. Range and meaning of announced change come from the selection of the pictures for the exhibition, not so much in its ideological foundation but also in its technical realization and visual confirmation.
Suzana Vuksanovic
November 1999.
