activity resulted in the sketches for paintings. And the paintings, that final product, really are paintings, the “real” ones, hand-painted in a room in her flat, adapted for that purpose. For a painter who had not painted since the third year <strong>of</strong> her studies, and I hope that local art critics would agree, these are rather good paintings! Moreover, it seems that the fact that the artist had not been engaged in painting, and that she forgot a little <strong>of</strong> what she had been taught about the way to do it, only improved her painterly métier. In the end, let’s try to sum up. Although much could already be learned about this in the past hundred years, artists, here and now, in their works more <strong>of</strong>ten still choose either expression or symbolization and, unfortunately, <strong>of</strong>ten both at the same time: the first through the second or the second through the first. And in both keys, Jela’s paintings are, simply, inadequate. In contrast, what is common to both Jela’s “conceptual” works and now these “real” paintings is, above all, the formalization process. Why and under what circumstances does an artistic process acquire a certain form defined by the production conditions, circumstances and requirements? How does an image translate from its technical into its manual form? What is gained and what is lost in this translation? How do some filled cracks in the asphalt, or shadows that some other exhibited paintings make on the gallery walls – that is, everything that is found in a photograph by its unavoidable presence – how does it then turn into a painting stroke by this simple translation in which the surplus is not left out but transformed into some kind <strong>of</strong> painterly noise, materialized by a brush stroke, first the computer brush, and then the “real” one? Thus, these images are at the same time analyses <strong>of</strong> an operational procedure in the production <strong>of</strong> painting, and an iconological analysis <strong>of</strong> the material traces that are transformed from one type <strong>of</strong> image into another, from one reproduction <strong>of</strong> the scene into a reproduction <strong>of</strong> the reproduction <strong>of</strong> the same scene. In this way, painting, as a production process, is always and at the same time both a practical and contemplative activity, that is, a practical contemplation <strong>of</strong> the relationship between the seen and the constructed. <strong>The</strong> active and the contemplative, as the iconologist Erwin Pan<strong>of</strong>sky once concluded, jointly “interpenetrate” in what we understand and construct as reality: “<strong>The</strong> man who is run over by an automobile is
un over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought.” <strong>Painting</strong> therefore does not have to be an obstacle to art-thinking. Branislav Dimitrijević
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