Works

METAFORMS

Vuk Ćuk is inspired with the research of relations between the physical and the virtual, digital world, trying to bring the observer closer to this relation through his objects of art. These co-existing realities are connected and represented via atypical objects of art. Led by the thought that the digital world of computers and technologies form our daily life, and even the way of perception and taste, Ćuk creates new, modern and harmonised aesthetic systems aimed at satisfying the new taste of art consumers. By using vibrant colours and an expressive black and white contrast, the artist attracts the observer, thus creating an intense visual stimulus. His generic (meta)forms signify an aspiration for the shift in the condition, order and nature of art.
A young artist, Vuk Ćuk, uses a specific working procedure upon realising his abstract art objects. Namely, by constantly examining the relation between the analogue and the digital, he starts the entire process by using sketches in a computer program, produced specifically for his artistic needs. Next, Ćuk uses his own technological procedure, by mixing pigments with various media and acrylic colours, to create new and authentic nuances matching his artistic sensibility and the urge for creation of unique aesthetically systematised forms. A thought-out assembly of the prepared smaller and bigger acrylic panels, and later their painting create abstract (meta)forms, as the unity of the author’s perception of the current outside world and his own sensibility. Discrete highlighting of the third dimension, enable Ćuk’s (meta)forms to ’coquet’ on the edge between the media of art and sculpture. Even though all seventeen selected formations make a homogeneous whole, each (meta)form offers a special sensual experience to the observer.

AESTHETIC SYSTEMS

The young Belgrade-based artist Vuk Cuk is presenting to the audience a selection of works in the form of paintings and objects, encompassed under the name Aesthetic Systems.
            The author is gravitating towards creating his own unique, authentic aesthetic systems, in this exhibition but also throughout his entire career. His artistic approach finds its grounds in the ambivalence positioned between the outer, and the inner world which inspire him at the same time, and in this way articulating his emotions. Actively participating in the world of modern technologies, Vuk finds his inspirations in the products of new media, while also using the available contemporary techniques of realization.
            In these modern times where digitalization and the use of new technologies encompasses almost every aspect of human existence, where the computer gives new purpose and opens up a whole new world, a new reality comes to life, and the laws of this world Cuk incorporates into his own personal artistic approach. He attempts to establish the aesthetic systematization of chaos, while at the same time questioning the relationship between the analog and the digital. His creative process begins in the domain of the digital, with the use of cutting-edge computer programs, and finalizes it though well-mastered analog techniques, and through these techniques he sovereignly rules the art of his personal creative language. Creating in his studio, the young author revolves in his inner world, constantly exploring the new potentials of his visual sensibility.
The end of the creative process and the discharge of the creative stream he experiences as a powerful form of catharsis.
            Vuk’s aesthetic systems represent an abstract collection of elements which interact among each other. The entire exhibition can be viewed as a unique visual system, and every part of it is an individual sub-system composed of its own elements. Each of the sub-systems tends to stimulate the senses of the observer through a process of interactive consummation. The audience is given an option to experience excitement through the personal interpretation of each individual work.
            Using the primary means of his artistic expression, Vuk creates modern open works, as an attempt to materialize a new eclectic visual world. He finds his inspiration in the subjective reading of beauty from the outside contemporary world, with a special focus on the products of digital technologies, but also the visual aspects of modern comic books. The outcomes of his individual aesthetic judgment recognized from the outside world, the author integrates in the creation process by adding them in the computer software, with whom he creates a complex and chaotic structure. The chosen structural elements are later adopted as visual templates of his future works of art. The computer software is specifically designed for the needs of Vuk’s artistic methodology. It is completely unique, and serves the author as a tool of transformation of elements, from the digital world to the physical plane. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Cuk finds different potentials in fragments that are created in this way, and some of them become flat paintings, while others because of the spaciousness loaded into their structure become objects that require three-dimensionality.
            In the realization of works Vuk developed his unique technological process of creating his own colors. He takes the pigments which are mixed with different mediums and acrylic colors, obtaining as an end result the authentic and personalized hues which have a highly expressive potential. Creating the colors in this manner, he accomplishes the materialization of physical shapes, which are a combination of organically intertwined liquid and geometric forms. Flat works are created in a traditional manner of easel painting, while the three-dimensional objects are created also by painting, and the careful mechanical mounting of specially prepared aluminum panels, into a harmonious final composition.
            Even though he modernizes the traditional approach to painting by constantly searching for new forms of expression, Vuk stays true to his easily-recognizable artistic expression in which shape and color dominate as the primary elements of communication.

Andjela Rokvic, art historian