From the Ambience to the Line

author Dean Jokanović Toumin
written by Blaženka Peica

 

“If there were no crises, nothing new would happen… and accordingly, modern art is in constant crisis,” is what Dean Jokanović Toumin once said in an early interview. As his own involvement in art runs almost 40 years, this leads us to the conclusion that he has lived the said crises through his work. Co-shaping them and permanently overcoming them, he has created an oeuvre in which new work is continuously appearing in light of the “assertion” on the specific problematics of a general state of things, but instead of a final “full stop” at the end, what continuously appears is a final individually drawn “comma”, a kind of personal, principled openness towards the “incompleteness” of the context in its entirety, and finally the standpoint which is possible to detect and interpret only in the lasting, in the synchronous and diachronic order.