We are all in this alone

Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska have found a way to make a built space
appear as a flat monochrome image. St Gjorgi Church in Kurbinovo is of modest
external proportions, but its interior is enlarged to infinity by the figures living in
the plaster that still sticks to the walls. These late Byzantine frescos, painted in the
spring of 1191, embody the so-called Macedonian Renaissance: pictorial doctrine
distilled into razor-sharp painterly invention.

Although they show us only the compromised colour field that this window onto a
vision of faith has now become, with its crumbled outlines and fissures, and areas
left unpainted to indicate ‘real’ windows, Calovski and Ivanoska are not turning
the frescos into an abstraction. The matte gold paint they use is not reductive; it
does not silence the promise of sovereign action – in the image – that the frescos
make every time we look at them, even in reproduction. To be able to shine, the
gold needs to rest on solid grey. Every part of this faithful portrait, which is also a
chronicle and a commentary, has therefore been painted twice.

excerpt from the text 'Briefly on Belief' by Anders Kreuger