Seen and not seen

Seen and not seen[1]

Gabriel Glid creates a map of the world starting points. Or, more realistically, he reveals life as it should be, and it is not. He narrates that art is more important than life. And that's not a small thing. For art contains an uncontainable thing. A kick forward.[2]

The afresh beginning is a structured allegory of non-place, the space between. A tactically proportional rectangular shape with a balanced rhythm of verticals almost ritualistically inclining towards higher, abstract, redemption structures of thinking. Minimalistic reduction, with the integration of meaning, according to custom, places Glid's semantics right in the centre - between all the foreshadowed extremes[3]. A nearly architectural composition of wooden curtains, in addition to wheels, suggests movement and rhythm with a careful geometric balance. The tendency of the falling curtain at the end of the narrative presents the materialization of a constant paradox. Set between the need for openness and the need for hiding, the Beginning again evokes personal but also eternal conflicts of modern societies, bringing us back to a place between - the "open" West and the "closed" East - again outside not the Iron, but the wooden curtain. The beginning again represents a new opportunity with You just keep me hangin' on.[4]

If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.[5]

Afterwards, that persistent drill form as an infinite spiral suggests breakthroughs of the phenomenal world borders. It moves witty and facetiously, the associative chain from drilling, eternal agitating (managing and avoiding) to protruding, but in fact, solemnly drawing us into the observer's position (in)possibility. In spite of the dimensions which emphasize the drill's potential, the selection of the material questions it. From the iconography, Glid again solemnly and exclusively takes us back to the drill's form - from the Infinite pillar to the specific object of minimalism identity. The repetition, contradictions and excessive dimensions of this artwork suggest the attempts and impossible breakthroughs within the circulus vitiosus pattern. Afterwards survives in this manner as a modern still life, an emblem of ephemerality and our unsuccessful attempts to avoid deaths, both  small and big.

Breathe again (like the Beginning Again) is Glid's reinvention of the older artwork Breathe[6]. This time, once the aluminium form of accordion became molten sponge with small metal blocks on the half-circle edges.

In Plato's Feast, Aristophanes speaks about the former spherical human form with two faces, 4 hands and 4 legs. They were powerful, arrogant and defiant. By sensing their power, Zevs halved them and therefore condemned them to search for their other halves for their entire lives, as their breath is being taken away by many wrongs as well as many right choices. This is not a love song?[7] In its unstoppable progression, time gives a new context to old meanings. Breathe again presents grey structures of the knowledge of eroded, worn bellows bounded by small metal for the great breakthroughs of humanity. We can almost feel the fusty rooms filled with tobacco smoke, cracked voices, grey strands, the silence of hope and disappointment, the anatomy of the first and last sigh, and of all between - a life that is anarchically occurring everywhere. This is another Glid's visual paradox, because the author, with almost pictogram narrative, transmits emotions from completely opposite registers. Poetic is compressed in this static scenery. What ruins us is not the fact that the hung silent accordian has been pulled out from the associated milieu, but the fact that it stayed within it for too long.

The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it.[8]

In Hebrew, Eve signifies both life and rib but is also the name of a newly-created unknown woman. She does not name life, but the possibility of re-creation, change. This sculpture is another Glide's monumental recontextualization in order for the artist to supply the world with variations. Thus the racing bike wheel became the opener of a large stylized half-open can. Eva is not just a game of equilibrium - between the pop art irony and formalistic aesthetics, it is a simulation of the psychological structure that bends under the pressure of life here and now.

But before you start to bore the life out of people with the harm of tobacco, you should feel the authenticity of the pain. Let your house die in the house, together with the family inside that house. After that, let's talk about your fucking theories on how to quit smoking.[9]

The only composition on the canvas is Morava - a modified package cover of the homonymous cigarettes made by former Tobacco Industry of Ni?. This nostalgic scenery from the iconography of the former Yugoslavia carries multiple temporality codes. By displaying, Morava presents an objective documentation of something that no longer exists, but which existence is confirmed in multiple manners. There is an enigmatic spatialization of time. Glid has compressed the time not only of old Yugoslavia, but also of everything that comes before and after. This scenery contains the processes of changing iconography from medieval archetypes[10] through the civil society formation during the 19th and 20th centuries, to contemporary corporate discourse. The constant dodge of Glide's symbolism is perceived in the quotation, but also in the intervention[11]. The Red Shoes fairy tale is a complex allegory of craving for hoydenish, wild female nature that takes us to the dance macabre / dance of the dead and back. Or Babyworld is a carousel, come to spin until you die[12]. In Glide's space, the distanced simultaneities lead us further: from the aesthetics of noir and the mystical, fatal ladies with elongated ankles framed by shiny high-heeled shoes that slightly infatuate male protagonists certainly leading them to death, to a wider field of metaphysical possibilities between Eros and Tanatos.

We wanted poetry and all we got was aches and pains.[13]

Heart Attack represents an online acquisition of angular bass traps for absorbing low-frequency sounds. Raised on the pedestal, they are closed to form a cube with an irregular slash in the middle. This void feeds the dark secret about its destinations. "If you start to give things meaning, that means that you are getting old, Anto." [14]

Gabrijel is the only one who has the anthropomorphic elements. One surplus "j" reveals a bluff with a taste of credibility.[15] He is the other side, the second nature, the other life within the compromise between the invisible affairs that involve a rolling pin. Gabrijel is a mimicry, the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, he is a double that helps us pretend that we are what we are not. Adapted.

Jelena Spai?

[1] Talking Heads, Remain in Light, Sire Records company, 1980 i Once in a lifetime, Warner Bros. Music Ltd, 1981.

[2] Paolo Sorentino, Svi su u pravu, Booka, Beograd, 2015.

[3] Most of Glid's artworks determine and then desert the declaration of one or the other side: static-mobile; mechanical-manual; light-dark; full-empty; outside-inside, private-public ...

[4] The Supremes, Motown, 1966.

[5] Piet Mondrian

[6] Breathe, aluminium, exhibition Run over, ULUS Gallery, Belgrade, 2008.

[7] Public Image Limited, Virgin, 1983.

[8] Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), Paris, 1932.

[9] Paolo Sorrentino, Hanno tutti ragione (Everybody’s Right), Milano, 2010.

[10] The author once named this work The White Female Angel - a kind of female double of a fresco from Sopo?ani monastery; the folk costumes and calming effects can establish the connection with Kosovo Maiden.

[11] Instead of opanaci [the traditional peasant shoes] and woollen socks, there are elongated ankles, red shoes and their shadow.

[12] Sve (Everything), Supernaut, Budu?nost sada (Future Now)

[13] Paolo Sorrentino, Hanno tutti ragione (Everybody’s Right), Milano, 2010.