Space as a Phenomenon

Like almost all young people beginning their studies in fine art, I had a strong need for the descriptive and the naturalistic in my work, for as long as drawing and composition were primary in the first- and second-year curriculum. I must admit that, in those years, a visit to an exhibition of modern art meant nothing to me. Nothing was clear to me, and, for that reason, it did not appeal to me; I preferred to go to the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where there was a permanent exhibition of artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina from the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The works of Gabrijel Jurkić, Đoko Mazalić, Jovan Bijelić, the Bocarić Brothers, Ismet Mujezinović, Vojo Dimitrijević, and others enchanted me and inspired me to continue working.

A year later, in 1986, I was fortunate enough to travel to Russia — Moscow and Leningrad — where I saw many works of Russian and world painting. At the Hermitage, among other things, I had the opportunity to see twelve paintings by Henri Matisse from the museum’s collection, shown to the Russian public for the first time. At the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, I saw works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin in person for the first time…

Only then did I see and feel the power of those works — a power that reproductions had not been able to convey. Among Claude Monet’s works, I saw Haystacks near Giverny (1889), Seagulls. The Thames in London. The Houses of Parliament (1904), and Rouen Cathedral, Evening (1894); among Cézanne’s works: Flowers (1900), The Banks of the Marne (1883), Trees in a Park (1885– 87), Self-Portrait (1880), and Bathers (1890); among Van Gogh’s works: Landscape at Auvers after the Rain (1890), The Red Vineyards near Arles (1888), and Portrait of Doctor Rey (1889); and among Paul Gauguin’s paintings, with motifs created in Tahiti: Café at Arles (1888), Still Life with Parrots (1902), Flight (1901), Bouquet (1891), Fruit Gathering, and several other canvases.

After my journey to Russia and my encounter with the works in these two museums, my understanding of painting changed fundamentally, especially regarding modern painting. The experience convinced me of what I had heard in lectures — that Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh had laid the foundations of modern painting. Their relationship to colour, line, and space; underpainting in warm and cool tones; underpainting with complementary colours; careful modelling through colour and purity of tone — all of these contribute to a greater fullness of form, to the relationship of one element to another, and to the compositional coherence and weight of forms. The clarity of linear structure, which provides the basis for subsequent chromatic elaboration, for a scale of contrasts and their balance; the relationship to space, perspective, colour, and underpainting (in complementary and warm-cool colours), as well as the treatment of line as both a visual and constructive element, opened up new horizons and directed me toward building forms with even greater patience and constructing compositions with care, in deep respect for all these elements.

The reduction of the painting to a flat plane, without illusion or depth, makes the painting a logical whole that exists for its own sake, rather than representationally “extending space through the frame of the painting. I became aware of the importance of the two-dimensionality of the painted surface, which I respect, and I have the same relationship toward external space. I am also aware that the third dimension in classical works is fictive; it is present, but it does not truly exist, not even in the works of the greatest masters of the illusion of depth — Renaissance perspective. It was on these grounds, which constitute the sources of modern painting, that I based my further work after completing the Academy, naturally enriched by the experience I continued to gain through exhibitions, journeys, visits to museums and galleries, urban and architectural landmarks, and the natural and other beauties that make our planet so interesting and perfect.

I have also travelled, for both leisure and study, to Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg…I visited France on several occasions: in 2005, I spent two months at the Cité Internationale des Arts, using its studio facilities; on that occasion, I saw everything Paris has to offer as a metropolis of world art.

All these journeys, particularly my longer stays in Turkey (Marmaris, Bodrum, Istanbul) and Greece (Zakynthos, Kos, Rhodes), where I spent entire summers for many years, enabled me to come to know this magnificent region, especially its layered cultural heritage, ancient cities, and museums. I visited Ephesus, Troy, Phaselis, Delphi, Olympia, Athens — the Acropolis, Rhodes, and Kos…The Mediterranean light, the blue of the sea, the clear and immense vault of the sky, people, music…all of this had a powerful impact on me, on my emotions, on my visual and inner experience, and, naturally, on my colour palette.

I also travelled to Western Europe, where, in addition to the usual visits to museums and galleries — the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Grand Palais, the museums in Nantes and Rennes, the museums in Stuttgart and Basel — I was fortunate enough to see several retrospective exhibitions of great masters of painting. While still a student, in addition to Radenko Mišević’s retrospective exhibition in Sarajevo, I also saw works by Sava Šumanović; in 1996, in Basel, I saw a major exhibition of international contemporary art. That same year, in Tübingen, Germany, I visited a retrospective exhibition of Auguste Rodin. In 2000, in Stuttgart, in addition to the permanent and exceptionally rich collection of the city museum, I saw a large exhibition of Franz Marc, for which the gallery walls had been painted in powerful tones, as those Franz Marc himself used. Paintings with red, blue, and green horses…Expressionist paintings in an expressionist gallery.

All this had a significant influence on my work, both consciously and subconsciously, so that my relationship to my work up to that point changed, and, naturally, the work itself changed as well. Every change in my painting arose from a particular inner necessity. For many years, the points of departure in my work were grounded in a concrete subject — landscape, whether natural or urban, faces, figures… their transformation became increasingly free from any descriptive element. I devoted ever greater attention to pure pictorial form, so that, at one point, these forms became purely abstract (2005–2007). Yet I soon returned to figuration, even though the critical response to that period of my work was exceptionally positive.

I approach painting by freeing pictorial elements from strict description. When laying down the drawing, I surrender to rhythm, to the distribution of surfaces, to their relationships, and to the overall composition imposed by the painting itself — or by the play of chance.

Chance is an important moment for me, as Nedeljko Gvozdenović has also observed (Likovne sveske, no. 7, p. 173): “A painter must earn his coincidences. We say coincidence as if it had fallen from the sky. But it has not simply fallen from the sky. Everything has its roots in our own personality, and it is very difficult to explain, to clarify, to bring into the light of rational vision.ˮ Of course, reason also plays its role in controlling everything that comes into being.

Georges Braque said, “I like the rule which regulates emotion. I like an emotion which offsets the ruleˮ — that is, first reason appears, then emotion, then reason again, and so forth. All of this, together with the natural and other environment in which I live, and the age of the flourishing of various visual media — colour photography, film, television, satellite television, the Internet — influences the formation of personality and a different perception of everything around us, and therefore also a different relationship to the painterly space and to space in general.

Cézanne says that “the artist concretises and individualises”; he also observes that “between the painter and his model there intervenes a plane, the atmosphere.” The space between the model or motif and the painter is extremely important and objective if the painting is reduced to a flat surface. When I paint, I am highly conscious of allowing space to remain what it is, without any “extensionˮ through the frame of the painting onto the canvas itself.

During Gauguin’s stay with him in Provence, Van Gogh discovered Japanese art, which enchanted him and helped him free himself from realism. “Look at the Japanese,ˮ he wrote at the time, “and you will see life in the sunlight and in the open air, without shadows… I will avoid as much as I can whatever gives the illusion of things, and since shadow is a deceptive phenomenon produced by the sun, I am ready to leave it out.

Gauguin says: “Shadow is a colour, just as light is colour, but with less luminosity; light and shadows are nothing but the relationship between two tones.

“Drawing and colour are inseparable.

“Drawing can express everything in a work of art. A strict, thick contour frames forms.

When referring to drawing, or more generally to expression in drawing or painting, the Chinese say: “The result of the activity of the spirit flowing decisively through the brush.

Indeed, drawing forms the skeleton of the painting, although the line should not be merely a contour. A line is also created by contrast, by two adjacent tones, whether harmonious or disharmonious. I control the line through layers applied afterwards, and often renew it during the process of work by varying qualities of colour, thickness, and rhythm… The Chinese also say: “So immediate and spontaneous is the relationship between the concept in the artist’s spirit and his hand that drawing reveals the personality more than the so-called completed work.

Cézanne says, “Manet’s paintings need a skeleton.

Gauguin says, “Impressionist painting is pure surface.

These statements are similar and highly critical of Impressionism and Manet himself; however, I believe that, were it not for Manet, neither Cézanne nor Gauguin would have so quickly reached the level I am discussing here.

My view is supported by the opinion of David Smith, who, in a text titled “The Language is Image, published in the journal Arts and Architecture (February 1952), says: “I date my esthetic heritage from impressionism. Since impressionism the realities from which art has come have all been the properties of ordinary men […] the bourgeois or upper class reality, and grandeur pretension have not been the realities which the artist’s eyes have transformed. The controls of my art are not outside the daily vision of common man. The vision and organization are very personal and I hope, my own.

Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin likewise departed from the objective realism of Impressionism toward subjective, spontaneous expression, giving objective form to an emotional response to reality and imagination that often had little to do with visual perception.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, in Likovne sveske (no. 8, Belgrade, 1985), p. 240, writes: “Working from the large to the small makes the individual form dependent on the overall form. The individual form only emerges from this; therefore, there can be no detail in isolation. Thus, for example, the form of a hand or of a tree is conditioned by the overall composition of the entire surface. Kirchner maintains that, in the realisation of a painting, making individual studies would not be of help to him. “The forms arise and change during the work process from the entire surface. This also explains the so-called distortions of the individual forms; the small must submit to the large. In art, one may emphasise and omit.

Just as handwriting in itself indicates the mental state of the person writing, so drawings, through the handling of line, suggest and reflect the event described.

Such an approach to the motif and to the work of art as it comes into being opens up possibilities for an entire spectrum of stylistic expression, one that depends on each individual in their own way.

We return once again to an observation that Gauguin made in his letter to Georges Daniel de Monfreid: “The artist must not copy nature, but take the elements of nature and create a new element. In the same spirit, Picasso is quoted as saying that one must turn away from the landscape to paint it with one’s own eyes. Professor Radenko Mišević, for his part, notes: “Painting is created on the foundations of the artist’s utterly individual human and creative experience. In Munich, in June 1913, Kandinsky says: “In many things I must condemn myself, but to one thing I shall remain forever true — to the inner voice, which has determined my goal in art and which I hope to obey to the last hour.

Even today, many artists claim that the masters of the past long ago exhausted all the possibilities painting had within the object world, often deriving from this the justification for the existence of their abstract works. I do not believe this is true, for art needs this visible world and will always need it, because it is within our reach and everywhere around us, while each of us experiences it differently. For this reason, it remains an eternal enigma to which we seek an answer through our work. In that search lies the richness and diversity of painterly visions, which are as endless as space and time themselves.

Something new always arises through the interplay of the spontaneous and the learned. One should draw as much as possible from the depths of the subconscious, for there lies the magic that makes us happy while we work. However, the artist should not surrender to it completely; rather, by using what has been learned and acquired, he should keep it all under control.

I draw lines and stains almost at random when I begin working on a canvas, until the moment I notice a form that evokes an association. Only then do I consciously continue working, carefully watching so that some newly emerged value does not disappear in the process.

I strive, in my own way, to interpret reality — my own lived reality and surroundings — or to create a new reality. In this, naturally, imagination plays a significant role. The objects that come into being, which I depict and define in my paintings, are not purely internal in nature — they constitute a new world that is not merely the experience of what has been lived. Perhaps this is the eternal instinctive striving toward the deciphering of life itself and of our being, or striving toward the absolute. Who knows?

The artist must reshape reality in opposition to photographic perception, and in favour of his “inner psychic reality”. In this way, spiritual and visual wholes are brought together. I mainly paint urban and pastoral settings. The fragments I engage with are found in my immediate and wider surroundings. The motif is an inexhaustible source from which ideas emerge in various directions, realised through diverse pictorial means, by means of everything that constitutes the artist’s being and stimulates his creative energy. Certainly, the foundation of every work of art should rest upon analytical drawing experience and an aestheticised sense of line, colour, composition, structure, and texture.

Ljiljana Zeković describes my recent paintings in the following way: “Environmental and architectural wholes break down into several pictorial events, into separate segments or episodes held together by inner energetic states and visual harmony, initiating a process in which individual forms become pure abstract form.

Starting from the hypothesis of the diversity and mutability of pictorial space in modern art — based above all on evaluation through pure perception, and under the strong influence of the social-historical, scientific, and other achievements of the time in which these developments took place — this paper offers an overview of the historical development during which the self-evident conventions of the representation of space, established for almost five centuries as a kind of law, gradually disappeared.

Through this historical overview, I wanted to highlight many theories and works developed by individuals, various groups, associations, and movements. This demonstrates that the world has countless pictorial faces, and just as many imaginary ones.

Space ceases to be a fixed attribute of nature. It becomes a quality that can be expressed through colour, line, and various other means. The three traditional dimensions are only one possible assumption; space can be represented in two or more dimensions and remain complete and meaningful in its own right. The properties of space can be suggested by various means, through the selection or combination of colours, taking into account both their symbolic and their physiological value. Artists ceased to believe that space could be represented only from the single vantage point offered by the Renaissance or Euclidean perspective.

Therefore, in modern art, space is not a simple given, common to all minds and individuals. It corresponds to complex ideas varying with each individual, each environment, and each stage of civilisation. Space in modern art is tested and tried out — now in the direction of feeling, now in the direction of representation.

“The aspiration to copy nature proved to be a fallacy in relation to nature, to the artist, and to art. The first can be imitated, the second must find its expression, and the third must establish its own laws. In this way, artists formulated three new ideas: the idea of interpretation and the idea of subjectivity, which prepared the idea of pure painting, wrote Bernard Dorival in his book “Contemporary French painting I (“Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1957).

Many of the principles established by the pioneers of modern art — Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh — became the foundation of modern painting and of its relationship to space. Yet all this was merely a prelude to what would unfold at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the emergence of Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism, and onward to the present day. The essence of all these movements, on which all these painters agree, is that the aim of the work of art is not to copy nature, but to renounce the representation of reality and thereby present its true essence in a comprehensible form. The need to examine the essence of things led the Cubists to use planes, sections, and the fronts of objects to this end, while it led the Fauves to schematise and deform. In their paintings, nature is truer to itself than to reality. The Fauves and the Cubists represent the world as shaped by human beings. Life, more than nature, is the subject of their art. The Fauves and the Cubists abandon perspective and emphasise pictoriality. They pay greater attention to the support and, in this way, offer a plastic representation of space.

The abandonment of perspective astonished the public, who regarded it as madness, since they failed to understand that perspective had been a pure hypothesis, a generally accepted convention that developed in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, and to which habit alone had granted value. They had forgotten that the artist has the right to replace one postulate with another. Change is the law of all living things. Modern art affirms the multiplicity of representations of space, and, therefore, unlimited artistic freedom, making art more creative and more fruitful.

All these artists and movements of modern art share a search for new forms and new meanings. In that search, they move now in one direction, now in another. A general conclusion may be drawn: these artists made the transition from a perceptual to a conceptual approach to reality, toward subjective response, toward the world of imagination and the subconscious — a tendency directly opposed to the main orientation from Giotto to the Impressionists.

Through this work, I wanted to point to the currents in modern art that directly or indirectly influenced my work and my relationship to pictorial space in general. That is, I have used the views and experiences of others to arrive at myself through their mirrors, and to describe my own artistic expression more distinctly.

Extract from an MA thesis, december 2013