Exhibition ‘Antiquity in the Present? Watermelons’ Opens on October 21

The exhibition of photographs and the promotion of the photo-monograph by Željko Jelenski titled ‘Antiquity in the Present – Watermelons’ will open at the Modern Gallery ‘Josip Račić’ in Zagreb on Thursday, October 21, at 7:00 PM. The exhibition will remain open until November 2, 2010.

At the opening, a joint video project ‘Past in Present’ by Željko Jelenski and music author Jeffrey Krvopić – Jeff will be presented, and the photo-monograph ‘Antiquity in the Present – Watermelons’ can be purchased at a promotional price of 250 kuna. 
 
LEGEND OF WATERMELONS
The ram’s skull at the door of the stone house, resembling a dangerous pagan symbol, greets the passerby like a signpost to an unknown land! What surprises await when the observer discovers that these are not the famous skulls frozen in the heavens of Georgia O’Keeffe, which symbolized the very essence of the Mexican desert ruled by sun and death, nor some Viking hut in a fjord, but a portal decoration of a little house in Cres’s Watermelons, uniquely captured by Željko Jelenski with his camera.

He is a photographer who regularly creates metaphysical studies from landscapes, one of the few for whom the camera is a tool of knowledge, not just a mere recorder of natural beauties that take one’s breath away. By observing, studying, and following miraculous natural phenomena for hours and days, tracing the paths of light and shadow on the stone walls of Watermelons, Jelenski managed to capture the entire mystery of this little town, creating an anthology of photographs!

Using the camera as a means of discovery, he not only managed to capture the unique but also to make it immortal. By photographing Watermelons in winter – he negated the eternal image of the Mediterranean and the sun, revealing a much deeper and more complex nature of this ancient landscape and town whose history is inscribed over four thousand years! And what a history it is! Watermelons, located completely solitary like a surrogate eagle on top of a cliff, under the blows of the bora wind, beneath which lies the wild beauty of St. John’s cove with its large pebbly beach, have remained untouched by historical shocks. Little has touched the dream of this town with its old castle, which blossomed twice in history, at the end of the 17th and 19th centuries.

Neither the Roman legions stationed about fifty kilometers away, nor naval battles, mixtures of languages and races, Venice and Byzantium shook this little town. Yes, chronicles record that during the Candian War between Venice and Turkey, the impoverished Osor sold his own nobility for 300 pounds, and among pharmacists and surgeons, there was a Vodarić from Watermelons who was rejected because he was digging the land, which horrified the ‘old and toothless Osor councilors,’ as noted in his unforgettable research by Branko Fučić. Empires fell, prayers were offered to pagan, then Greek and Roman gods, to the wounded and resurrected Christ, prayers were offered to St. Gaudentius, in Valun they wrote in rounded Glagolitic (older than the Baška tablet!), Cres’s towns changed masters, shone and fell, inscribing only time into their walls, but Watermelons have eternally dreamed on the rock, resembling a vision in the fog. Even today, only about fifteen people live in this solitary refuge.

Probably even in Roman times, some good farmer tilled a plot next to the town, drinking fragrant wine in the evening and eating bread, and probably some old woman in the Middle Ages, just like today, quietly fingered her rosary praying to Christ and the Mother of God, thinking of her dead… Jelenski’s camera reveals precisely that dreamy and forever frozen state of the town. The charming church and soft outlines of houses with old shutters and creaky gates, of uneven lines that seem to have been shaped by the wind and rain, rather than human hands, carry in the photographs that unforgettable patina of centuries that makes every urban space in Kvarner intimate.

A person is alone in Watermelons, but in the encounter with eternity and the primal elements. Closer to him are the rain, wind, eagle, and goat grazing on grass, than another human being. Photographs without people reveal the realm of absolute silence. The camera captures atmospheric changes that will give the town a new mythical nature each time. Under the snow, it will become a magical place like a fairy tale. The ice-bound window and door emanate an unreal glow. Outlines disappear in the milky mist like in the landscapes of Italian vedutists who questioned the nature of the real in their paintings of Venetian lagoons.

It is precisely the snow that will make these photographs universal artistic records. They are simultaneously pictorial poetry of the place Watermelons, its absolute uniqueness on the world map, but also a universal image of coastal towns in endless landscapes from jagged cliffs from which the one-legged Ahab set out in search of the white whale, to the wild beauty of Irish coasts battered by sea waves.

Indeed, Jelenski’s Cres dry stone wall adorned with ice and the landscape compressed by snow identifies Cres and Ireland, that is, it becomes a universal island landscape that hides the secret of creation. The photographs of Watermelons fully correspond to that famous Joyce’s description of Ireland: ‘It began to snow again. He dreamily watched the flakes, silver and dark, as they fell obliquely in the light of the lamp… It fell over the dark central plain, over the tireless hills, it fell quietly over the Allen God and further west, quietly over the dark rebellious hills of Shannon, over the lonely graveyard on the hill where Michael Furey was buried… his soul slowly melted when he heard the snow softly falling through the universe like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead…’

In other words, the photographer, just like Joyce, entered the essence of that mysterious atmosphere of Watermelons that makes them timeless. And the people of Watermelons have remained like Michael Furey dreaming in the fragrant Cres land their eternal and hopefully untroubled dream. Capturing the true drama of clouds over the town that even the greatest Baroque master could not create, the photographer not only captured an unusual weather change characteristic of Watermelons but also gave them (again) a supernal and unreal dimension. Curved stairs and small shutters of the streets belong just as much to Watermelons as to some view from the Tunisian coast or Alexandria!

Under the raindrops, the recordings will again give the town something biblical, like a refuge whose damp walls protect the last human beings before the arrival of Noah’s ark. Doors cracked by wind and salt belong to times much older than human memory. The full moon over the chimney is also an archetypal image. From the shot of the Watermelons church in deep shadow with a cross, the photographer made a symbol of the entire Christian civilization!

The town is ‘caught’ even from completely unusual angles like a window, so we have the impression that it was made by a lizard or a bird hidden in a stone hollow. Separate shots will reveal the brilliance of all those little things that make home life – from colorful clothespins hanging on a line, to an antique hanger and plates on the wall. That is also the most intimate imagery of domestic things for which we always realize too late in life that it is our only and most essential refuge. Photographs from the house with a cross on the wall and fragrant herbs almost exude the scents of figs, prosciutto, and wine unchanged since time immemorial.

In short, Željko Jelenski has created a unique and unrepeatable memorial of Watermelons or a photographic legend just like the true legend of the town where once upon a time, a young loving couple took their lives by jumping from the cliffs. The king of Osor, according to that legend, did not allow the relationship between his daughter and the young man from the hill, so he expelled his daughter from royal Osor. She settled with her beloved and died in a place that would be named after her Ljubica/Lubenice, later under Italian rule becoming Lubenice. The old and sad story is now complemented by an artistic photographic cycle that has made this Cres town, unique in every way, a legend! (Marina Tenžera)