October 6 – November 4, 2022
Museum of the City of Belgrade, Resavska 40
The exhibition was realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and the Saša Marčeta Foundation.
“The exhibition announces Mane’s ‘return’ to the Belgrade audience and the art scene, from which he has been absent for almost ten years,” said Ksenija Samardžija, director of the Saša Marčeta Foundation, adding that the exhibition is both monumental in its character and format, yet fragile to the point of sensitivity, as suggested by Vasko Popa’s verses:
“… I have returned from my journey… To scatter the ripened stones from my bundle… Here on the square to share them…”
“It is precisely within these dimensions that this exhibition offers us a cathartic encounter, not only through the artist’s return to the city where he was born but also through a profound connection rooted in origin, the land, and what both is and is yet to become,” Ksenija Samardžija observed.
“No perversion of the world can penetrate the heart of a whistle.”
In the exhibition catalog, art historian Nikola Šuica writes that the “multi-disciplinary project titled ‘Return to Belgrade’ brings together the artistic achievements of Olivera Katarina, Vasko Popa, and Enriko Josif.”
Mane Šakić’s Return to Belgrade – Painting of a Compressed Potency
When an artist’s visual and emotional observations of the world and life transfer their histories into fine art, they are often mutually intertwined within his or her own conjoined perceptual potentials. After all, art has, since antiquity, identified its universal liberating capacity for expression with various authors’ individual artistic articulations, which is perhaps most notably, and quite freely, found among the merits of modern culture’s imaginary progress.
Creative will, as a spiritual substrate of the most precious kind, participates in creating experiential illusions, playing with, or even exposing its own role through a variety of art forms. In the medium of painting, acts of abstraction, manipulation of symbols and gestural breaking with public, unquestionable and documented reality are always on the verge of an intense spiritual revelation. Mane Šakić’s compositions emanate the spirit of an implicit every-day urban life; within their rhythmized freshness, strangeness and angst embodied in rather totemic forms that emerge from a liberated, so-called, abstraction; in the shapes that bind evocative floating objects; or in exaggerated external confessions, a battle is fought against inconsistencies, histories and myths that each and every metropolis’ heritage carries. The consolidation of all subsequent moments in Belgrade’s two-millennium long history marked by devastating steel and later gunpowder strikes against its topography and soil, which eventually left it ravaged and burned, as well as the landscapes of the northern Banat plains, or the hills towards Šumadija, make for a unique lament over the city. These long lines of overlapping narratives also serve as the artist’s point of departure that draws on the multimedia piece titled Return to Belgrade, in which the singing performance, movements and scenography carry the verses, interpretation and music, in an amalgam of the artistic reaches of Olivera Katarina, Vasko Popa and Enriko Josif*. Aside from being a diffused space of historical turbulences and sunlit mornings, they are also a haven for personal introspections, such as the ones confessed by Vasko Popa in his meticulous poetic imagery of real-life difficulties and struggles—from folk proverbs such as the one about spiders covering the sky in webs, to those about rocks and clouds, to the “interior sky” symbolizing the power of love that flourishes in one small Belgrade apartment. Mane Šakić’s paintings are capsules of colouristic strokes that form painterly structures propelled by the influences from his previous observations, learning, and perceiving, eventually transforming into riddles of ambiguous spiritual exaltation.
Aesthetic and perceptual experiences appear to end where mythic and heroized transformations of the past begin, resulting in a composition in which the entire body of motifs scatters across the frozen image of latent flowing dynamics, similar to harmonized music clusters that pass through and emerge from the painted fractions of the canvas surface. The horseman and the hero are looming personifications painterly articulated as silhouettes—as if they were an elaborated pledge of the bygone time. The images draw on mythology from folk poetry in a manner that connects the proto-Earth and clouds in the ruined outlines of geographical features, which is reminiscent of the south-Slavic legacy found in Petar Lubarda’s painting. As a result, the painted composition constitutes a vibrant reflection of the intuitive strength of the soil and vegetation, the cityscape and drifting cumuli, displayed through the cloudlike whiteness of the artist’s most striking aestheticizations, which create gestural fluidity of what we observe. This psychomotor principle is also part of cataloguing both evident and more subtle motifs in Mane Šakić’s paintings; the origin of toponyms and morphing figures are all unified within the painterly battlefield; one might invoke poignant Grünewaldian images of violence, suffering and crucifixion, but also of whitish procreation, in which assumptions of cosmic speculations are inscribed in the layers of pigment. There is a passionate approach to some sort of disincarnation, which reveals possible, implicit corporeality of the pictorial confession. The everlasting force of existence, conscious witnessing, and the narrated avalanche of recitative and music flow transpose within the parallel realities into the lengthy process of a painting layering.
In such personal conditioning, portraits and references remain unnamed. And yet, we recognize the presence of the Belgrade past: either in the artist’s representations of long-gone personalities (such as despot Stefan Lazarević), or in the organic references to biomorphic architecture used in sculptures or ritual votive adorations of horsemen waging their fierce millennial war against the unholy forces. Such expressive exhilaration is bound to gravitate towards the localised cosmological sensory inflow of the previously experienced world of poetry, musical harmonies and meditative forms. The elements that bind pigment and mass on the painting surface establish a corporeal biological circulating form (typical of some fragments) and introduce a landscape structure, or even an aerial view. In between two blinks, a viewer may recognize urban-like terrains, ancient walls, or personifications of cartographic pieces that transform into striking dynamics of clearly visible shapes compressed into a vibrant expression. The shaded colourist painting directs the viewer’s attention to the painter’s reflection on a suggested urban toponym’s earliest days. Among pioneering representations of sites portrayed differently from how they appear to others are, by all means, El Greco’s famous depictions of a locality known to the history of painting by his cityscape of Toledo, or his aesthetic visions of unified figures, dedicated to biblical and evangelic themes. Overcoming current divisions and ruptures in what truly constitutes advancement in contemporary art requires, above all, expressive promotion of truth in an artwork. Over more than two decades of exhibiting in galleries and art venues in Spain, in Madrid, or his temptations across the continent of the “New World”, his student visits and shows in New York, Belgradian Šakić has conveyed his distress over the consequences of geopolitical ‘last judgments’ and a transition period for visual art. Even a time gap of several decades can still conjure up images of migrants from the pop culture’s most famous city “Gotham”, or New York, and their life-saving focus on undiluted emotions, love for and devotion to their origin. In the history of painting, this is typical of visual art created in rapidly changing times after World War II, concerned with the migrants’ experiences and feelings of loneliness and estrangement: from Arshile Gorky’s surrealist aesthetics of enchantment and abstract bioexpressionism in the late 1940s and 1950s, or later in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the late 1970s and then 1980s, who received significant media attention and made a major contribution to the promotion of personal freedom and his Haitian-Puerto Rican origin. A discontinued composition that serves as a repository of personal explorations conveys existential hardship related to the surroundings and the galimatias of the consumer society and newly-formed totemisms of the new age trends. The reaction to disclosing or concealing irrefutable hierarchies is demonstrated by social-motoric, and for estranged individuals, suppressive and essentially infernal effects. And while the present may be more imposing and powerful than the past, reflecting on the artist’s working time and pilgrimage into the heart of his profession attest to the questioning of one’s own instinctive authenticity. As a result, the phrase ‘return to home’ appears to be a pledge of artistic experience and its origin is achieved by placing a firm emphasis on the very essence of a creative process. Aside from references, the paintings also utilize revelations arising from abrupt structural clashes. They can also be examined outside the rational and logical mechanisms of visual perception, and it appears that the dominant mode of observation should be “with eyes wide shut”—the very phrase used to describe the world where perplexed by cosmic enigmas, an individual life’s fate is suppressed and eyes closed before the laws of the past. It is the same fate portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s last film of the same title, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s book Dream Story. In the work concerned with a secret that has violently shaken both social reality and art, a compromise towards the advantages of faithful love appears to be the only refuge from the occurrences that nearly bring entire cities down. In a painterly sense, the light of some new stars has been ignited in an attempt to defy oblivion, which is precisely what the paintings from the series Return to Belgrade convey. As a millennium-long call for freedom and recognition, freedom of contemporary art is, thus, symbolically revealed at dawn—surely on the eighth day of creation. In the paintings of a distinct expression, emulation techniques are depleted, if not cancelled, transforming into a confessional form of an irrational turmoil brought about by the authoritative and socially dominant truth of the enforced and protected artistic correctness. In their magical expressive unintentionality, these works take almost written forms, as palimpsests of the very process, while in a gestural sense, they are linear, powerful and chromatically replete pieces that display “geological layers” of the artist’s hometown as dreamy outlines coming out of a passionate potency and striking pictorial abundance. Many denuded and authentic confessional works can, thus, be invoked, one of which is, surely, the fusion of artistic phenomena such as Olivera Katarina’s voice (who, by the way, is the painter’s mother), Vasko Popa’s verses and Enriko Josif’s captivating music and their unified vision of ancient Belgrade. There is no separation from reality as it is, nor cancellation of the, frequently disassociated, tradition and heritage. For even this dreamlike archaic Belgrade and a vision of a vanished and rather unfamiliar city could be interpreted as a new suggestive veduta, and, thus, as a layered spiritual, historical, personal, or social genesis. To those who can sense it, Mane Šakić’s paintings are surfaces that provide the excitement of a genuine emotional emission.
– Nikola Šuica
References:
Olivera Katarina / Vasko Popa – “Return to Belgrade” (1973), program “Return to Belgrade.”
TV Belgrade, Yugoslav Radio Television, October 18, 1973.
Music: Enriko Josif | Lyrics: Vasko Popa | TV Direction: Sava Mrmak
Photo: Bojana Janjić