IL VENTINOVESIMO

“The Mabef M/18 easel stands folded near the western wall. Its beech frame has shifted a few degrees outward, though no indication of manual adjustment is visible. Dust along the lower crossbar remains unaltered.

The five pigment jars remain positioned along the northern ledge. Their spacing has not changed, though a thin deposit of fine blue dust has appeared beneath the second container from the left. The lid remains sealed. The powder inside the jar appears compact, with no visible disturbance of the surface. The canvas against the eastern wall remains unmarked. It has been moved slightly forward from the wall, increasing the distance between linen and plaster by several centimetres. The adjustment appears minor but alters the way light reaches the surface.

During the afternoon, direct sunlight enters through the southern window at a higher angle than in previous months. The beam reaches the canvas earlier in the day, forming a pale vertical field that slowly expands across the centre before dissolving toward the edges.

The effect persists for approximately fourteen minutes.”

For his fourth exhibition at Massimo Minini Gallery, David Maljković invited Ana Lozica to collaborate and the project was developed specifically for this exhibition. It began with a series of conversations in the café of the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb, from which a text gradually emerged that became the starting point for Maljković’s works and the exhibition itself.

The written part of the project consists of twelve entries written on the twenty-ninth day of each month over the course of a year. Each text refers to the same “fictional” space, viewed as a possibility for developing different positions of gaze.

The space that appears in these entries gradually takes shape as a construct. It emerges from fragments of information, objects and details mentioned in conversations between Ana and David, but also from a nearly technical description of the same space over time.

The works that emerge from this process take their starting conditions of the text – its atmosphere, rhythm and fragments of space and continue to develop them in their own medium. The text thus becomes a framework from which the works gradually take form, as does the thinking of the gallery space itself, its present elements, and the exhibition as an autonomous event.

Between writing and making, a space that did not exist is slowly taking shape. The exhibition does not reconstruct it; it only temporarily makes it visible.