Beauty de Cri

“Beauty de Cri” is an artowork by Merima Smajlovic marked by a rich semantic complexity and mixture of different media – painting, collage, poster, video projection and a book as a visual work of art. Dramatic condensity of the painting, carried out through collage technique and expressionist gesture, reflects the strenght of emotions that can not be contained within the frame of puriefied design. In that sense Merima Smajlovic’s poster can be seen as subversion of a commercial design. She was inspired by schocking themes, set design and costumes of Peter Greenway’s film that has a subversive energy which can be found in underground film (authors such as John Waters, artgroup Le dernier cri etc.). Greenaway’s film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover“ presents without a compromise the humane rage, violence, sadism, murder and canibalism, interwoven with spicy hedonistic menus. The film is not only a methaphor of political situation in England during Lady Tacher, but a methaphor of modern times in general. 
Merima Smajlovic “that does not want to move, but to burst”. She catches the last moment before the burst, just before the emotion comes out of the body as a cry or a punch, and transmits that energy with the strong lines, colour with prevaling black, red, green and blue tones, as well as with collage cuts presenting wild dogs, pornographic scenes, scared eyes, flickering flames, wide-open mouth of a murderer-canibal … Painting of Merima Smajlovic aims to overcome static state and become a bursting event, like the baroque painting aimed to cross the two-dimensional canvas frame and move to endlessness. Energy of the painting is reinforced with the energy of the words that, like in dadaistic experiments, do not have a simple function of describing a psychological event – they ARE a psychological event. Words break the silence of the painting, they are a “cry of the painting”.