DRAGAN JOVANOVIC * SAM NA OSTRVU OD LJUDI: мај 2017

A Rhapsodic Dragon of Serbian Painting

A Rhapsodic Dragon of Serbian Painting

Painting of Dragan Jovanović (1964), which separated from the magisterial course of his former creative work, and which in the last three years has been increased in number and various topics, demands a serious critical evaluation. Owing to his two-decade long occupation with icon-painting, not deviating from the traditional medium where he is perfect, Jovanović goes into a venture to create a different, less canonical vision of the world based on morals and experience he has gained, but a vision that the more it suits his temperament, the more it is full of genuine pathos and meditation.

Instead of hieratic and archetypal forms with which the icon presents something lying beyond, God’s over-wisdom, a comforting truth about the end of all pains, in front of us there is a lyrically spread space, filled with strange happenings: removals and migrations, finished and unfinished chess matches, strange travelers who wander around celestial and cosmic wide space, spider-like drawing artists and very short pencils, toys and insects. Having been set in a special scenography, in front of the heaven’s stage whose windows open into the heaven beyond the heaven, brought together by an endless journey, departure and meetings, these motifs represent the base of Jovanović’s visual vocabulary and endlessly inspire his joyful, hymn-like vision.

In such unstable space which is always changing, opening into new horizons and reviving, owing to the multiplication of Jovanović’s ’bestialities’, and in the play of motifs that are on the edge between a portrait and a symbol lies a challenge of interpretation, but there is also a drama and salvation of Jovanović’s art. Where do gigantic insects, dolphins and turtles travel? In which distant country do ships and cars, which go where it’s only possible to fly, carry colourful eggs and chess-pieces? Who draws the moves in chess matches that take place at some levels we can hardly understand, and who are the inhabitants of megalopolis built on the ships’ hulls who, like a castle in the air from a fairytale, lie ‘hanging in the air’?

The answer to these and many other enigmas that are placed before us by Jovanović’s painting is hidden in his painting itself, in its being and nature, in the coats of paints that lie on the wooden board, graded and measured in the way that in the totality of his vision they make the impression of brightness, airiness and lightness. In that vision, the spider-like drawing artist, in whom we recognize the painter himself, spreads his invisible threads and in his net lies the totality of everything that exists: in the airy, heavenly sound everything shines, washed with the celestial brightness of wedding of the heavenly and temporal world. From this point of view, Jovanović’s painting still stands on the ground of the icon and icon-painting: all his motifs are materialized in the same way, and portrayed faces reveal the characteristics of ideal types more than the characteristics of personal features in their appearances. At the same time, moving a step forward, at the beginning of our century, his painting lies like a witness of the meeting of last epochs and a storage of long lasting knowledge and experience, because of which in its genealogy among numerous influences one recognizes searching for a synthesis and the integral in the creative work where his forerunners are the artists from the group Mediala.

Let’s finally ask one more question: who is Dragan Jovanović? A spider that draws invisible lines of the drawing in these paintings, a short pencil which can be, at the same time, an embryo of the whole universe or a rhapsodic dragon that separated from the earth and sneaked into the space where our persistent glances can’t reach and where our understanding reveals the uselessness of its efforts? All these three and above all an eternal boy and a restless nomad, who, like Noah, built his boat and set out into the endless wandering around cosmic spaces, so that he can save his boyhood in a constant play, wondering and discovering.

Miodrag Danilović

Holiness = Holy Light

It is not an insignificant fact that the painter and icon-painter Dragan Jovanović was religiously formed in Čačak. In the city where culture is respected, on the horizon of Serbian figural fantasy, a new star began to shine. It is an unusual master, capable to transform technology experience, precision and gentleness of the icon into the fantastic, with Christian values acting on the wild terrain such as artistic wonder. His skill lies in discipline and monastic self-restraint, while it is probably important that the artist knows bushido, samurai way of overcoming difficulties. Jovanović, like ‘a warrior of light’ (known in Serbian-Bysantian and Japanese tradition), in a very rich Balkan culture saturated with fantasy, managed to make an unusual painting turn, to be more exact – an accomplishment.

Fantastic, like the underground river of general painting, emerges all of a sudden, too often inferior to powers of darkness. With his self-sacrifice and knowledge, or perhaps with a boyish purity of his soul, which he managed to keep in himself, about which experts of his creative work write, Jovanović made a Copernicus turn in the recent history of painting unusualness. Instead of the pictures in whose background act the chthonic, the black magic, the necrophilic and the thanatotic, he joyfully and vitally flew up to the light. His painting works along an ancient iconographic principle: holiness = holy light. One is brightness, beauty and sense, not only death, agony and hatred.

This Serbian master inspires great optimism; his art is an expression of hope in rather tired contemporary figural art. He discovered a hidden source of painting. Powers of irrationalism, emphasized too strongly in fantastic, too often come from the dark side of the world, from the night, from a demonic, strange or nihilistic dream. Dragan Jovanović managed to be self-realized in the rarest and visually most difficult things – in fantastic that has as its base white and divine, in beauty, goodness and truth, in iconophilia and blissful existence. It is a spiritual, not only a visual accomplishment, a necessary peace that opens the sources of light. In the end of the introduction, in the rich creative work of this painter, it’s enough to remember the words of Alexander Men in order to understand the range of activity: ‘The fight against disintegration enter the beings armed with spiritual weapons.’

Dejan Đorić

The Endless Match

… but in the end we’ll watch the pattern as it begins to tear,

we’ll see the chaos that’s underneath all the clothes

that the Angels wear …

Mark Eitzel, Outside this bar

A long time ago, play and imitation were recognized as the crucial characteristics of human nature in which passion and love received their familiar, eternal forms, and the poison of hatred lost its bitterness and became soothed. Man is a being that learns while playing and celebrates life by playing and dancing. Time is eliminated in the kingdom of play. Everyone can be either the king or the pawn and the rules that arrange the system where the game is realized are nothing else but symbolic garments of the critical and climactic moments of the existence for which the game prepares us in its disguised, abstract aspect. No matter how much life escapes and resists both acting and thinking in its disarrangement and chaos, it would become monotonous, gloomy, unbearable without play and it would be reduced to monotonous and empty repetition of the same moves. In order to lead the game in the right way, in order to make imaginary wars and campaigns be the result of real excitement, it’s necessary to be found in the role, to make it to measure of the opponent, to play the image of a pretended weakness so as to make him be careless and hasty. The most wonderful experiences of the game, and in the same way the most wonderful experiences of love are probably those when we misunderstand our opponent, when we overestimate or underestimate him and when he, using a fine, single gesture, confuses our self-defense. To be beaten, to confess love to ourselves and to continue the play at the level where we are equal with our enemy, who is our beloved, isn’t it a knightly content of both love and life?

Two latest series of the painter Dragan Jovanović seem to testify for the characteristics and situations that have just been described. In the first series, the main motif and metaphor is a chess game, but that chess of Jovanović doesn’t become customary by both the status given to the game itself and by a wonderful inventory of the game. His matches, openings and checkmates are battlefields where the clashes of cosmic dimensions are solved, while the inventory of the game includes butterflies, ants, wretches, toys, paper aircrafts … The fragile world that has held back a familiar hierarchy of the chess pieces, the world, which is moving, swarming, rushing and staggering, sometimes drunk with laughter and sometimes stiff in the state of the checkmate, decides in our name and in the name of time. Its deceitfully naive look, its harmlessness is a refutation of man’s firm principles and steady convictions that he rules the nature and is supreme over the world. All the truths where our safety lies can already in the next moment be disturbed, destroyed and swept by the game whose protagonists patiently look for their positions on the chessboard. Being indifferent about the fact whether their fatal move will mean the destruction of our world or the dawn of another world, they care for the game which is a measure and sense of their action. What convinces us that the game is not destructive after all are certain pictures from this series in which appears the whale Christopher who is in love. We can see him emerging from fragments of the completed matches, with the mission to carry a precious burden on his shoulders, the city, a symbol of an insatiable desire towards some higher states and spheres of spirit. His companion is a dragon, a viewer of exalted players whose game he imitates with spiral and twisted figures of his long, spotty tail.

In the other series, a fabulous content of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs is modified into a foolish and weird pantomime filled with irony and humour. In nine pictures (there is one dwarf more here!), which make a circled whole arranged in three rows and where Jovanović’s heroine Ichigo is emphasized by her size and placed in the middle, a strange play is on and a secret dialogue of Bastard, Tramp, Scoundrel, Idiot, Jinx, Hanger-on, Jerk and Lazybones. In contrast to the portrait of the heroine, who is given in the pose of a dramatic turning towards the focus of attention, who is somewhere out of the picture, all eight dwarfs are portrayed in full-face, their physiognomies are of so many close characteristics, so that it can be said that these variations are rather of the same iconographic type than they are of different characters. This similarity makes the series be homogenous in style and testifies that scoundrels, tramps, jinxes and others are in fact the members of the same family. Each dwarf is followed by a familiar repertoire of Jovanović’s painting: insects, aircrafts, artillery, balloons, ships which draw their precious burden and tugboats which drag the cities on their platforms. Like Ichigo, who has a crown in the form of the city on her head, the dwarfs are also crowned with cities, tanks, cannons, helicopters, two-winged insects and through the windows on their caps and hats we are often watched by the twilight moon or the moon from the stared, midnight sky. The background where the described characters appear is a familiar battlefield of Jovanović’s mysteries: the sunlit sky covered with fluffy clouds, it gradually becomes overcast and transforms into the sharp, winter air with snowflakes.

Who are Jovanović’s dwarfs characterized by pejorative names and what kind of intrigue and plot are carried on about a mild and absentminded look of indifferent Ichigo? Do they perform their pantomime in order to draw attention? Do they try to make the face of the indifferent, city-crowned queen smile? Is it in fact the same character, the knight and the warrior, who constantly disguises, adjusts the roles for every new caprice of the icy fashion plate? Do they carry on their shoulders the safety of a fragile union where the stability of a perspective lies, a precious version of existence and reality, or do they represent truces and wars which are dictated by the queen? She seems to know the answer to all these questions and it’s she who is given the central place, but she, in contrast to the talkative dwarfs, wisely keeps silent looking towards an unavailable distance for us. Just like in a game, a lot of things are sacrificed so that the queen stays vague in her purposes and mysterious in her elusive walk around the black and white fields.

Jovanović’s new, brave moves on the chessboard of artistic fantasy represented in these two series are at the same time the crown of his past opus and the matches in whose openings, solutions and mates is discovered a fragile texture of an art and a changeable perspective in which the painter observes his position. Without fear that he could be beaten if he was followed by enthusiasm, but also without being too vain, which is a characteristic of many invaders and winners, in front of us there is a man for whom life is still mystery, play, enthusiasm, dance and wonder. Facing the struggles of this brave warrior, we testify the wisdom that is bought there where the rules of the game don’t apply any more and where quiet expectation is the only arms. Being hidden behind eight bearded masques having large moustaches, he looks as if he shouted to us: the true struggle is the one for the expression and sense, the one in which the sense of the victory is not a defeat of the beaten, but an aspiration to cause great animation and revive humanity in both ourselves and the opponent.

Miodrag Danilović

THE CITY ON THE WHALE’S BACK

THE CITY ON THE WHALE’S BACK

Ancient myths about the structure of the World vary, in fact, the same image-story. They articulate and compress the same comprehension – the idea about the essence of the Universe. Using the language of carefully chosen symbols that are not numerous, as many as the fingers of the hand, a little more, hardly about ten, but never more than a dozen, different cultures describe a universal image of the universe something like this:

‘The earth lies on the angel. The angel lies on the rock, the rock on the turtle, the turtle on the bull, the bull on the elephant, the elephant on the whale, the whale on the water, the water on the air, the air on the dark, and the darkness wander around the eternity.’

So: the angel, the cliff, the turtle, the bull (Minotaur), the whale, the water, the air, the darkness, the eternity (there and back, the end=the beginning) etc.

The elements and symbols make an endless, circular chain. A short, wise story. A simple, clear image. The meaning is compressed in an amazing limited number of signs, and it can infinitely be considered (completed, weighed, measured). And infinity is what it is all about, isn’t it? All the rings in this axis (the vertical, the chain) are important, have their irreplaceable role. The whale is, for example, in charge of strokes, of the pulse of the World. When it plunges-emerges the whole World shakes (up). Besides, the demons persuade it to relieve the burden. Fortunately, the whale follows his rhythm, stays calm and constantly beats time to everything that exists…

It is the story that, more or less, is retold by itself in endless versions. Only the number, position and order of the symbols vary from civilization to civilization. Somewhere, the crocodile jumps in instead of the whale. The number of elephants varies from four to forty. And they are always oriented towards the poles-cardinal points of the World. In the Assyrian-Babylonian version of cosmogony, three elephants, which hold the sky, stand on the turtle-monster. All in all, the message-meaning of this beautiful structure in the free time-space tells us about existence, long life, wisdom, strength-violence, fertility, power, immortality, eternal regeneration, birth-dying-resurrection, wealth (hidden treasure), indestructibility, perception, beauty, beginning and infinity…

Myths themselves contain a great deal of perfection that they deal with, weave, form and fill in the joint memory. And then, it is handed down as a general memory or in the form of the Bible stories on the origin of the World. And furthermore, up to its destruction-transformation-revival-resurrection. These fascinating and terrifying fairy tales, picturesque legends, messages from eternity, represent a golden core-an apple or a motif-reason of the existence of our World. They use an understandable language of symbols to talk about the architecture of the universe, its vertical, symmetry, about concentric spheres of the cosmos, including physics and metaphysics, natural and supernatural, that is, encircled, complete view of the Cosmos.

A lot of paintings of Dragan Jovanović deal with a symbolic study of the World. In spite of all that, this artist combines ancient archetypical and new cosmogony symbols. He adds his own symbols in the chain of already known ones. On the back of his whale, which is personalized, has his name, character, role which is changeable, there is a megalopolis of the 21^st century. The same city is installed on the deck of the aircraft carrier of the paper (the first lesson of the origami course). The author insists on the game. Almost all his paintings are illuminated with the shine of childhood. The objects of reality are deprived of rigidity and seriousness, and the aleatoricism of children’s games is added. On the head of his model, beautiful Maja, instead of a hat, shaded hair or a scarf with Babylonian-Byzantine ornaments, we can see the walls of the city-World she is dreaming about, where she’ll go and invade it. From picture to picture, like in an atomized cartoon, we follow transformation of symbols and meanings they carry (or they are attributed). In the atmosphere of the pictures, we hint hope, enthusiasm, cheerfulness and the goal within sight (just behind sight). In deeper segments (somewhere behind the requisites visible in the pictures) we detect a mild-necessary dose of worry. The whale Christopher relies on the strength of his drowsiness, but above all on his tolerance. He is ready to suffer the noise-progress of the City which is growing. The cruiser-carrier of bazookas carelessly sails down the mainstream of time. Maja’s smile is a sign of Good hope. The order of symbols suggests a convenient progress of events. A mild intuition is inspired by brilliant solutions and discoveries seen in the dream. While creating pictures-storage spaces of symbols, this painter presents numerous dimensions of the World that are not visible otherwise. He pumps ancient knowledge and opens lost and strayed messages. He spontaneously announces the truth, not knowing that he knows it and not insisting that we should accept it. That knowledge is perfect and it certainly isn’t (only) of this World.

Milenko Pajić

THE CHESS MATCH WITH THE CREATOR

THE CHESS MATCH WITH THE CREATOR

MEGA. The 20^th century was a period of multiplying things. Objects were endlessly multiplied without a real need and without any sense. An epithet that fits this period (becomes very close, grows together with it) is: MEGA. The atomic bomb had a destructive power measured in MEGA-tons. The cities grew so much that they became MEGA-polis. The world fame of the actors in the field of entertainment and show business became so big that they were recognized as MEGA-stars. Now the Colossus of Rhodes looks like a toy compared to MEGA-skyscrapers. Corporations or MEGA-trusts became more powerful than countries. And banks, so-called MEGA-banks, always having a hunger for profit and interest, promoted a MEGA-trend in politics, named globalism… I myself gave a modest contribution to the spirit of the time by thinking up and creating a series of large collages (dimension 1.10x0.90m) which, of course, I named: MEGA-collages. The terms: small, micro, mini were despised and refused. The unique item was replaced by the multiple. Only something big was worthy of our memory, comments and admiration. The only thing that counted was the reproduction of something without any character or physiognomy. Millionaires were replaced by multimillionaires. Film robberies were expressed as a prey with endless zeros: 00000000000000000…

MORE. Only big series of the same objects which came down from the assembly line were favourite. Everyone willingly took part in the game of big numbers. The multiple of the objects was declared with shorter and shorter best-before date. The period of the finished product storage to its throwing away to the dump was shorter and shorter. In this way, a lot of objects didn’t even reach the shops, those MEGA-markets. Instead, they were immediately sent to MEGA-dumps, where they were subjected to the process of recycling (which became one of the newest and most profitable MEGA-businesses). A person, a customer, a user, an ideal MEGA-consumer identified with the objects which surrounded him. Without numerous MEGA-objects, without throwaway things, without these stupid and ugly things, he would be lost, forced to confess himself to be a perfect nobody and nothing without all these things around him. No matter how much he made an effort to buy more and more things, to take part in MEGA-shopping, he was more and more often confused and lost in the supermarket (S. Basara). And the collection of the objects that he collected around him threatened to bury him and eventually – smash him. The catalogue of the objects, which were all for sale (which could be bought with discount or even more convenient if you waited for seasonal sales), was endless. We were reluctant witnesses of the well-known bible sentence: If there is just little of something, there will be abundance of it.

TOO MUCH/MANY. The beginning of the 21^st century (which, in fact, hasn’t finished yet, but is a kind of the prolonged 20^th century) doesn’t bring anything new. What was a large amount of – MEGA! Now it is – TOO MUCH/MANY. MEGA became a forgotten child’s play only. Now it is forcefully enlarged, blown up, sprung up, metastasis has spread from, in a way, modest and bearable MEGA to enormously enlarged dimensions and to the total absurd. Degrees of comparison are: MEGA, MORE, TOO MUCH/MANY. There’s nothing that could be small, tiny, modest, rare. No. Everything is glamorous, of big dimensions, too big, accumulated, too crowded, and exaggerated in every respect. The whole World hustles around in the explosion of exaggeration. It’s not enough to be moderate and balanced. It’s important to exaggerate! Managers are too busy, and workers’ unemployment is enormous. The rich are insolently (too) rich, their lust is insatiable, and the poor are inconceivably (too) poor. Politicians are (too) lying. Bankers - (too) greedy. Open a newspaper (a magazine, a site, TV, a leaflet) and you’ll see a redesigned world. Everything is exaggerated everywhere, in all fields: actors – overact, sportsmen are overtrained, and women are with too much make-up (with too much jewelry, too modern). Men: they are either macho men, too body built or, on the contrary – too sensitive, in a problem with the raised anima (instead of father, another, so-called mail mother appears). Journalists – too much informed. Musicians – too much practiced. Students studied, studied and overstudied. Philosophers are absorbed in thought so much that they failed to see the essence… Exaggerating, it is a trend and imperative. Don’t do anything in a balanced and moderate way. Make an effort and exaggerate, like all others. Only The Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle announces the fulfillment of the other part of the prophesy: If there is abundance of something, there will be just little of it.

ORDER AND MEASURE. There is a painter in Serbia who is trying – and succeeds in putting things in order - order and measure in our World without order and without measure. The number and measure, my belief with pleasure! – the motto of the Association of Engineers and Technicians of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1892. And what is the most important thing is to give meaning to that order and your measure of the World. It doesn’t mind numbers of beings, things, objects and structures. As for the World, a large quantity = abundance, and abundance is a real wealth (not a nightmare). All that can’t be exactly counted, like the number of blades of grass in the nearby field, the number of leaves in the crown of the nearby lime-tree or the number of water drops in the summer shower, these are numbers of mysterious details from which the sense and the beauty of the World are made of. That’s why it’s very important to be devoted to observing, exploring, registering, noting an endless number of elements from which our World is created of. Nothing is so unimportant that it can’t find its proper place in the paintings of Dragan Jovanović. He himself accepted his neutral name and surname, hardly recognizable in numbers of such names and surnames in Serbia. There are as many Dragan Jovanovićes in Serbia as John Smiths in England. In the shelter of his anonymity this Dragan Jovanović, a painter, installed a mysterious watch tower. From it, he carefully and persistently watches the World around him. The World in himself, too. The World in books, textbooks, monographs, as well. He entered into a hard and uncertain, but an extremely attractive job:

To count the fish in the rivers (Zapadna, Velika and Južna) Morava

To paint one bird from each flock (together with the hard-working humming bird, which floats in the centre of the iris flower, like a fighter-plane which is fed by fuel in the air sucking the udder of the plane Mega-truck)…

To give a chance to insects, the ancient inhabitants of the planet. (What do our several thousand of years mean compared to their eons?!)

The plane-toy is a real plain contraption compared to ability of long life of a dragonfly or a silver-green grasshopper …

MEGA-cities called ‘Titanic 2X’ float over the seas (not larger than a pond or a hemp dip) …

The Chinese good-natured dragon is having a rest on the slope of a cumulus-nimbus. The zeppelins with the inscription Coca-Cola are fluttering around it, children’s balloons of pastel colours are buzzing, ping-pong balls, which are smiling, are floating. Some objects, living creatures, commercial slogans, philosophical sentences, sayings of amateur writers of aphorisms – the thing that is on the artist’s mind, what he sees around him or in himself, what he does while playing – as well as symbols and metaphors, all these together are in the same moment-space of the painting. Yet, all is in harmony …

The chessboards – stage scenery have several squares – windows for watching infinity. In the starting position there are dark blue-silver hymenoptera with perfectly polished shields. They seem to be still, but they’ve been given the ability to move in all directions (in all spatial-time dimensions), freedom which only the queens in the barren areas of archaic chess have …

This painter is not partial at all; he isn’t homo-centric either. His position is close to the procedure of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers or land surveyors. He is occupied and motivated by unexplored possibilities of the World. What could have happened (and it didn’t)? Who could meet whom (and he did)? What has been missed and lost for ever? And what has been saved only in a dream and imagination of the artist!?

A lot of paintings of this strange and special Dragan Jovanović are a sort of mental experiment with an issue in doubt. He presents phases of an endless chess match that Nature started with Man at some ancient time. That match is still in the phase of Opening. The World is opening, hesitating and is not sure where to go. What is good for it, and what is good for us? Who knows it?! It’s not good even to learn the whole truth. ‘What will our descendants, inheritors of our nightmares do?’ Wonders the modest Dragan.

From all Dragan Jovanovićes in Serbian culture, among whom are people of all sorts: from engineers to tramps, from poets to fishermen, from football players to actors, and so on; just this Dragan Jovanović started an endless and periodical job – to establish artistic order in our World! However, while doing this it mustn’t lose its particularity and its beauty. He is playing a beautiful chess match with the Creator. He isn’t asking for mercy, he isn’t returning its moves, he isn’t asking for a break. Oh, what a match it is! What a miracle of the play! Dragan Jovanović doesn’t have the very thought of a draw. He wants a real play of spheres, both virtual and living one…

We can tell him that he risks a lot and that he is on an uncertain Road. And we can wish him to be followed by happiness on that Road. He doesn’t need anything else; he already has everything or he will supply himself with all he needs.

19 April – 2 May 2013 in Požega Milenko Pajić

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