Even though they appear as seductive in the „white cube“ of an art gallery, the works of Milena Mijović Durutović achieve their full expression only when they are confluent with the energies of some more specific space. Displays on non-typical exhibition venues enlarge the significance of visitors moving through space and investigating the works from different perspectives, as well as discerning their dimensions and ways they spread through the given ambient. The immediate corporeal presence of the viewer in the ambiential settings into which she builds her works makes possible an active synthesis of impressions on the relation between the painting material, surface and the surrounding, the painterly gesture and the composition within the frame of the painting, compositional variations in the series of works that are part of one cycle of paintings, as well as the manners in which the paintings were brought into a dialogue with the space in which they were installed. In the case of installation works it is even more significant, because she always develops them in a concrete space, in correlation with its characteristics, as well as with the manners in which the audience can be brought into it.

The display of Milena Mijović Durutović’s exhibition in the Cinema Balkan was being conceived in a period lasting for several months, and it was built in the space in a week time. Even though all the works that were included into the exhibition were already shown on other places, and could be quite easily shown again in the Cinema Balkan, the author was challenged by the specific nature of the space and the wide variety of possibilities to install artworks in it, so she started a quest for the type of display which would be in the same time in the dialogue with the exhibition space, and make possible its visual and experiential transformation. The process of producing the display did continue the process of production of individual works, which took place in the artist’s studio, as well as the chain of experiments with their spatial organization and ambientalization on the previous exhibitions, in order to produce a relation between the installation on the ground floor of Cinema Balkan and the fragmentary nature of that space, as well as between the facture of the paintings placed at the lower floor with the facture of the walls in that space.

The result of experimentation with the manners of displaying works in relation to the spatial and technical resources offered by Cinema Balkan were three exhibition units on three floors of the building. The ground floor was filled with intensively illuminated installation made of wire which floats in the central part of the space, and is constantly changing in relation to the temperature of the air, casting shadows in the shape of linear drawings, and acts as a counterpoint to the display of oval shapes on the floor, painted with blue pigment in a pure state. The title of that installation is “Vibrations”. It spreads though the space in several ways, taking its central part and entering into dialogue with its structure, as well as with all the details present in it. In the perceptual experience of the viewer it shapes a specific interplay of impressions in which the chromatic is contrasted with the achromatic, the closed shape with the open structure, the tactility with the play of light and shadow, and the multiplicity of its segments with the compact nature of the whole.

On the floor under the “Vibrations” there is the display of the “Depths”. These are paintings made by blue and black pigment on the transparent black jute fabric, which lets the light go through it, and at the same time stresses the material aspect of those paintings and demonstrates their porosity, which distance them from the modernist principle of flatness in a very drastic manner. On the second floor below ground there is a display of the works from the cycle titled „Traces“. It consists of canvases grounded with soil, painted with pigments of strong intensities, in order to achieve forms brought to the proximity of signs, but without quoting conventional sign systems. During the making of the paintings there were obviously some unconscious contents breaking through and producing signs which were sublimated in the manner in which they would evade the standard interpretation methods. If there is a sign system under which they could be subsumed, it is the sole product of the author, and it could be surveyed only by synthesizing, classifying, analyzing and interpreting the formal character of those signs.

The reduced abstract sign character of the works, as well as the way they are made of shapes that are void of narativity and filled with strong pictorial intensities are the result of the author’s quest for universality. It is her striving to overcome cultural barriers and already codified meanings which were fixed by different sets of positive knowledge, which are often applied to the interpretation of culture and the arts. It is focused towards the audience open to immediate sensual and intellectual experience, which is ready to leave all the baggage of the implied, presumed, inherited from the process of education and socialization, as well as from the experiences determined by the previous encounters with similar works, and to face the works themselves. That striving towards universality does not include stepping away from the social, cultural, institutional, economic and political contexts, nor the ignorance of them, but insists on the active emancipation from any type of one-dimensional determination by them.

To name this striving towards universality the author was using the word “cosmos” as a metaphor for the unlimited ordered system, whose regularities influence the multiplicity of the limited worlds it contains, and that influence goes through rhythms to whose effects they are exposed. Therefore, all these works count on the viewers whose bodies are not products of biopolitics, nor are the horizons of their experience irrecoverably confined to the social and political frames in which we encounter them. That would be viewers who would approach the works and the ways they are displayed by evoking their own inner rhythms, and use that path to analyze the rhythms composing them, as well as the manners in which they relate to the way the audience behaves in the exhibition space. As already Henry Lefebvre has stressed, when he was defining rhythmanalysis, the basic condition for analyzing rhythms in the outer world is to get familiar with our inner rhythms, and get in balance with them.

The principles of abstraction and expression, as well as the striving towards universality of the visual language and the emancipation of the viewer in the poetics of Milena Mijović Durutović are joined with her own processual approach to the execution of the works, and then to the execution of the display, into which the works get integrated. It is based on tracing the rhythms of inner and outer nature during all the phases of the creative process, and the continuous channelling of her expression in the direction of repeating the motives and producing variants of applications of a visual solution. Her works, stepping away from the iconic character of the sings which appear in them, are made to be indexical, in the sense that they do not manifest some external content, but only the traces of the creative process. Every cycle of her works is a kind of a testimony of the creative process, not as a document, but the index of successful solutions of the key visual and formal problems that she attends to in her work.

„Disciplined imagination“ is a phrase which Milena Mijović Durutović has introduced a while ago, in one of her interviews for the Podgorica based daily newspaper „Pobjeda“. She brought it up to name the process of constant reduction of expression to what is necessary. If the initial impulse that leads towards an artwork can be expressed by the use of only one or two colors, a modular structure, or a simple ready made shape accentuated by the layer of raw pigment, then whatever excesses that can be considered as superfluous. Also, for a consistent cycle of works it is quite enough to be based on a variation of one motive, or one plastic problem. On the other side, the more the work is reduced in its original form, the wider is the spectrum of its interactions with the contexts in which it is exhibited. In difference to the containment of the imagination by the project oriented thinking in which everything is predefined, the disciplined imagination is actively fostered, only its expressions are reduced to what is essential only.