Tableaux Vivants
Note: Some of the Photography contains nudity.
TABLEAUX VIVANTS (2017-ongoing)
A Collection of events, performances, and installations staged for the camera.
A tableau vivant (French for "a living picture") from the historical point of view is a static scene featuring one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent images, usually with costumes and/or props created on a theatrical stage. In that sense this series of digital photography titled TABLEAUX VIVANTS (plural) is truly using the same concept of representing life, but with a unique twist of having main characters represented through drawings or other forms of art, on an environmental stage. The photos are part of an open, experimental narrative about life, nature, and a spiritual journey - with new variations being created to add to the series.
Introductory text by Jason Jenn:
Vojislav Radovanović is an artist with a rich oeuvre of drawings and paintings, but he never limits his body of work to just one medium. This visual artist also has a vast history of works realized as Ambiental installations, experimental films, photography, and performance.
Since 2017, Radovanović has been living and creating in Southern California. Radovanović's move from Serbia to California further encouraged his dedication to create a unique vocabulary and narrative that permeates the deep questions of life, nature, personal identity, and spirituality. The influence of California’s unique culture, history, folklore, landscape, climate, flora, and fauna can be recognized in many of his new works. Careful observation reveals a subtle influence of several artistic movements that took place in the second half of the twentieth century in California.
“Tableaux Vivants” is a series of performances, events, and installations specifically framed and captured by the camera lens. Instead of thinking of them as merely still images and photography, we can view them as artifacts of a staged event and moments in time that are parts of performance in an ongoing narrative.
Although there is no single storyline, the photographs are unified by the inclusion of original drawings and other artworks that Radovanović places in certain shots. There is an invitation for the viewer to construct connections and fill in the spaces between the images. There is a strong dreamlike feeling that permeates throughout the photos, a sunbathed coastal euphoria in both the landscape and essence. In some works, Radovanović himself interprets the role of a puppeteer who brings to life two-dimensional drawings of animals and plants, putting them in the foreground. And sometimes he himself is present in the composition, not only as someone who operates these paper puppets but is in conversation with them.
These photographs are only a small part of a much broader series, scenes of a kind of spiritual pilgrimage, one in which the observer can feel something that is beyond our intellectual stratum, yet giving the sense of universal unity of all that exists.