Work

Artist statement

The structure of my psyche dictates personal affinities that give birth to my artistic expression. The nature of painting coincides with my ideas. Both go in the direction of pealing the perception-presentation layers until I get to the ones that “hold water”. I guess growing up between ugly, unfinished facades made an impact on my perception of what is important.

My painting has the aesthetics of a buildings construction site. It’s in the stage where it’s shown how bricks and bars hold the wall before it’s made beautiful. My painting can only be good if I don’t care about how presentable it looks. When it holds the wall, it’s good enough. If I ‘had to’ make a painting look one way or another, I would lose the interest for this activity. I don’t impose a subject or a theme to research. Concepts emerge spontaneously from their material representatives. At the same time concepts are their unconscious precursors. This is far away from saying: “Feel free to interpret my work as you wish.” It means that I try to use the full potential of my psyche while creating.

In the first phase my painting is mostly guided by intuition. I am merely allowing, helping the inner content find its appropriate form. It is a fairly long way from that stage until I rationally narrow it down, sharpen the concept into a spear point of rational meaning. Working on a canvas, intuition slowly makes place for thinking and buds of rational associations pop up.

Zjale

 

I am drawn to the mystery of the pattern of traditional Serbian rugs, its forgotten meaning. The fact is that, if we look at old specimens of traditional rugs, there is a certain order – the layout of colors, repetition and variations in the relations of the characters (motifs), tell me that there is a described event, ritual, probably a story. All the above mentioned is necessary to make a story: repetition (reciprocity) shows temporality, variations to the development of events, spatial positioning of a certain motif, perhaps, to a different place of action, or more probably, to the importance of a certain happening for the story. In a similar way a child’s drawing is structured, where more important elements are larger and above others, or the position of frescos with biblical stories shown on the walls inside orthodox monasteries. Unfortunately, we lack the meaning that en(dis)ables the understanding of the content. Interpretation was definitely changing in time in space, as it was shown in Sreten Petrović’s theory on the revival of the old faith in new conditions.

I am afraid that the meaning of those stories included in the folk pattern is perhaps lost forever. That leads to the conclusion that my current occupation with art is an internal effort to, using words – motifs from traditional rugs, visual language of the ancestors, with meaning unknown to me, tell a story which meaning I don’t understand myself to try to revive the lost connections. These paintings are non-verbal stories, fairytales of the lost sense of our ancestors who found a way to overcome the time and once more mumble the lullaby in our modern ear.

My fine art expression is conditioned by the structure of the own inner content. I accept the fact that there are clusters of joint concepts of different origins which are mutually, analogously connectable. In my opinion a character of a person and personal affinities isolate and connect concepts of different areas in their own way, creating that apart from archetypally strong pictures, each person has his/her personal and unrepetitive cluster of important tastes, smells, stimuli, melodies, pictures, stories, adventures which are more important than the others and in which one recognizes something in common.

Because of that, in my paintings I work with a system of graphic motifs, created in advance, that has a neutral relationship towards the concepts, and equal incompatibility with any one of them. The choice of traditional motif as the bearing syllable of visual sentences I imply to my own inner and non-verbal mythology which has its roots in the rich heritage of our ancestors.