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SAŽETAK

Halucinantne melankolije

Rene Miković…

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”No one plunged into the depth and core of my art like Mirna Rudan Lisak. Sometimes she saw more than even me, which gave my work a new dimension and interpretation. Because of Mirna’s views, I renamed my entire series titled Lady Corona to Ondine, realizing that she really resembles the famous water nymph from European mythology, that was interpreted by many great artists.”
– STEPHAN LUPINO

”With her interpretations of artworks, Mirna Rudan Lisak once again managed to combine the incompatible: this time she united Lupino’s art with the literature of the French surrealists and their most prominent representative, Comte de Lautréamont, as well as Wagner’s and Ravel’s music”
– JURA GAŠPARAC FOR THE CROATIAN NATIONAL TV

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SUMMARY

Apocalypse on the trail of dystopian surrealism

Stephan Lupino is a Croatian artist internationally renowned for his New York photography in the 1980s. Along with these photographs, his brilliant portraits, nudes, and fashion photographs have been published in prestigious global magazines such as Photo, Zoom, Vogue, King, Max, Playboy, L’Europeo, L’Espresso, Per Lui, and many others. It is impossible not to be impressed by the constellation of celebrities Lupino portrayed in his studio, such as Billy Idol, Bryan Ferry, members of The Ramones, Frank Zappa, Malcolm McLaren, Grace Jones, Pelé, Joe Strummer, Rupert Everett, Terence Stamp, Malcolm Forbes, and many others. However, from his earliest days, Lupino has also been drawn to the idea of a woman who is strong and emancipated, yet wandering and unearthly. His artistic eye turned her female enigma into a mythical creature that he, unlike Picasso, had no intention to destroy. On the contrary, woman remains an ideal he puts on a pedestal, where she continues to shine in his vast body of work.

Lupino’s works are consistent bearers of turning points on a large scale. After the New York period, where he dedicated his work to the exciting underground art and nightclub scene, he returned to Croatia at the beginning of the Croatian War of Independence. During this time, he created the photographic cycle My Angels, in which he portrayed seriously ill children as a metaphor of dying, sadness, and disappearance. Thereafter, he further developed his art — abandoning photography to focus on sculpture and painting — believing that he could express something more powerful by reflecting the experience gained in the multicultural environment of world metropolises. By mixing up different arts and media, Lupino created a peculiar artistic expression and, venturing into new forms, his own artistic direction, Lupinizam, emerged, bearing a strong stamp of his personality.

Lupinizam is by no means an exercise in vanity. It is the individual style of an artist who bravely walks the contemporary world alone — a world long devoid of any kind of style around which, as in the past, all branches of art could organize their expression. In the 20th century, the modernity finally turned its back on the traditional practice of categorisation of stylistic concepts into movements over time. This foreshadowed the impending emptiness of the postmodern age, whose vast environment gave the artist absolute freedom but also became his greatest curse because he was left with nothing to cling to. Furthermore, given that only the most powerful personalities are able to fill this boundless vacant space, perhaps the only possible, and often the only correct way of looking at art today, is to attach it to the names of the artists who are its creators.

Lupino constantly jumps off the rails in his eternal frenzy to live several lives at once. Along the way, he continuously surprises with his innovations and creations, providing answers to the world we live in. For the last fifteen years, he has replaced the camera with a chainsaw, hammer, chisel, grinder, massive old oak wood, iron, bronze, stone slabs, and other robust materials, to take his first step out of photography into the design of unique furniture. Especially noteworthy are the monumental chair-thrones dedicated to rulers like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, King Arthur, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ban Josip Jelačić, George Washington, Queen Elizabeth, Tito, Mao Zedong, and Vladimir Putin. At the same time, Lupino does not fail to remind us of the absolute justice of God — by which the same fate awaits both king and beggar — and we remain completely aware not only of our own mortality but also of the transience of all cultures, which are, from their inception, condemned to the irrevocable ruin of their civilizations.

However, Lupino’s works are more than mere vibrations of the historical and current resonances of time. As an artist deeply in touch with reality, he boldly heralds a world yet to come in a series of thematically related cycles titled The Fifth Element, Another World, The Apocalyptic World, and The Cataclysm, where, despite the gloomy reality, he sees expressiveness and beauty, even when he speaks — in visual terms — of an apocalypse in the wake of dystopian surrealism in which the eternal struggle between good and evil takes place. At the same time, he believes that the evil that man has inflicted on the world cannot be dispelled. Thus, many of his slender sculptures — such as Predator, Bat Woman, Marilyn Monroe, Snake Woman, Fire Woman, Aphrodite, or Hermaphrodite — are the very personification of wickedness, whose power is fuelled in the darkest corners of the artist’s imagination. These works anticipate the future: They are shaped in wood and metal and painted on relief canvases filled with disturbing figures, anatomically similar to humans and placed in a surreal and post-apocalyptic environment. Their feelings are completely devoid of hatred, but there is no love in them either, so despite their latent eros, together they emanate distance, alienation, and loneliness. From these works emerged Lupino’s special world that oozes an atmosphere of anxiety and mystery: His art balances the dualities of Eros and Thanatos, despair and hope, the conscious and the subconscious, the constant and the changeable, the real and the imaginary, truth and delusion. It is precisely this unusual Lautréamontian ambivalence that has made it possible to place Lupino’s opus in space and time. Consequently, the exhibition at the Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts produced unexpected analogies not only with other artists from completely different artistic branches and media but also from several completely different epochs, thus shedding new and original light on his creative work.

These are “spiritual overflights that disturb the dreams of kindred spirits,” and in this maelstrom — which in the artist’s eyes turned the ocean into the realm of the prince of darkness — Lupino, like the French Surrealists, renounced antiquity as too beautiful, too perfect, and thus completely devoid of life; the life he has felt and lived in its fullness. Even when he interprets antiquity, the forms in his works do not follow any canon of beauty and are free to emanate inner tension. On this path, his dynamic silhouettes belong equally to the aerial and underwater worlds as he transforms them into mythological-allegorical motifs that — as in The Agony of the Angel or the mythical Ondine — are often falling instead of rising. This authentic European mythology is the source of the medieval aesthetics seen in Lupino’s archaic-futuristic monumental works, made of weighty, masculine materials: His robust crosses radiate chivalry, while all his iron-chained furniture is created primarily for the artist’s inner castle, where a broken mirror, in the shape of a crown witness, offers countless perspectives on the pervasive Eros, permanently embedded in the core of Lupino’s entire work. Yet, he sometimes moves in the opposite direction too, creating elongated sculptures that resemble Early Gothic works, hovering above ground and tiptoeing like ballerinas, painfully aware that man will always throw only angels to the demons. It is this eternal clash of heaven and hell that will give birth to the Angel of Fire, while the ancient Venus, born of the sea, will receive wings to finally escape the ocean by flying into the expanse of celestial blue.

Numerous wooden sculptures created in the same period display applied metal parts and are usually dedicated to a woman who is a true knightess, because Lupino is shrewd enough to know that the world was created primarily for male conquests, while women are left to conquer the conqueror. Perhaps this is the reason why his abstracted sculptures are always in battle armour, which simultaneously protects the complexity of the female being. In addition, on his artistic journey he creates a synthesis of air, water, earth, and fire, bringing us back to primordial elements amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and on the brink of coming out of this global crisis, he again turns to woman as a symbol of hope and love. Thus, in today’s world, where Lupino sees no true love other than unconditional maternal love, he shapes sculptures such as Nurturing Mother, Madonna and Child, and Olive Woman, showing that we can never escape our subconscious, which always — no matter how old we are — keeps us in our mother’s lap. However, since artists are by nature powerful agents of spirituality, the motif of the mother also brings Lupino back to sacred themes. One of them, The Last Supper, flickers on a large canvas that shapes the King of Heaven and his twelve apostles with the colour of the sea and the underwater refraction of light, giving the ocean back to primordial goodness.

There have been very few artists like Stephan Lupino, for whom every choice has always been a matter of life and death. This trait, typical of anyone who shuns mediocrity in life or work, is precisely the reason why the excitement generated by his art is analogous to the unpredictability of his life. Above all, it took courage to repeatedly fling himself from the top of the world to its very depths, so that after falling down he could once again stand up. Lupinizam, therefore, attacks the audience just like the waves of a mighty ocean, where each of its creative acts devours the previous one, hiding it in the deepest corners of its dark interior only to bring to light something completely new and unexpected, and made, in essence, of phosphorus foam and the celebration of life in all its magnificence. This style is not a style at all, because if it were still an aesthetic principle, as in the past, the artist would lose absolute creative freedom, and the audience would be deprived of the surface dance whose irregular rhythm constantly takes twists and turns, reminding us how few artists have so boldly and consistently rejected all that they possessed before. Since Lupinizam emerged precisely from the artist’s life, one thing is certain: Lupino will never be stranded on his artistic journey, and this is why, after his great success at the Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, we can expect him to deliver many more creative and artistic surprises in the future.