La douleur exquise by Iva Perković

La douleur exquise by Iva Perković is not an exhibition that seeks empathy; it establishes it as a precondition.

Perković operates within an expanded field of painting, yet without the need to further legitimize it — the works themselves clearly demonstrate that painterly thinking here is merely a point of departure. A series of small-format works on paper functions as a fragmented herbarium: reduced palette, dispersed stain, a line that barely sustains form. The floral motif is neither decorative nor symbolically closed; it is reduced to the threshold of existence, almost to the trace of its own disappearance.

At the same time, the space is intersected by hanging installations — mobile, but not playful. These are spatial constructions that owe more to reliquaries than to classical sculpture: branches, textiles, found elements, and metal plates form a fragile yet disciplined structure. These suspended objects (more precisely: ambient mobiles / assemblages) do not “decorate” the space but organize it, introducing a vertical rhythm that draws the viewer into the field of the work.

Particularly noteworthy is the treatment of metal, where Perković employs techniques close to the tradition of sacred craftsmanship — relief shaping of sheet metal using repoussé and chasing. Yet there is no nostalgia for icon painting here; metal is not a bearer of the sacred, but of memory — of pressure, imprint, scar. The surface is not an image but a record of force.

The entire exhibition functions as a controlled system of tensions: between the fragility of paper and the hardness of metal, between the organic lines of branches and the rigor of composition, between the decorative impulse and its constant negation. Nothing fully disintegrates, yet nothing is entirely stable.

The title La douleur exquise should not be read as an affective key, but as a precise diagnosis. It refers to a pain that has already undergone filtration — what remains is the pure form of experience, stripped of narrative excess.

Iva Perković (b. 1976, Šibenik) works within contemporary art across photography, installation, and object-based practices. In her earlier work, she focused on the human body and the immediacy of experience, documenting “ordinary” models without constructed identity — as raw presence.

In her more recent work, her interest shifts toward materiality and processes of transformation — she uses found elements and discarded materials, reorganizing them into spatial, often floating structures. Her installations are built from fragments (e.g., book pages shaped into floral forms), where narrative emerges from the material memory itself.

She continuously exhibits in Šibenik and participates in group projects and the local independent scene, developing a practice that moves between image, object, and environment.