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Descent of the angel of silence
Maybe the greatest miracle that painting and poetry can work is that they enable us to fathom the deepest secret of the World – i.e. to see what is beyond seeing. Man and nature are but a small part of Universe, more often than not the one which is less perfect and less aspiring to perfection, the one which is in shadow rather than in the light, immersed in the mist of the subterranean rather than in the omnipresent brightness. The quest for things-forgotten-and-beyond-seeing is, therefore, spurred by the yearning of homo spiritus to surpass and improve his imperfection, to move out of the shadow, an to pass from his microcosmic into a cosmic world. It is in these things-beyond-seeing that painting and poetry converge. Poetry scatters and painting assembles this invisible reality, or poetry assembles the image of everything while painting scatters this image over everything. They represent the breathing of the World, the pulsation of Imagination, the inhaling and exhaling of the Mind. The poet and the painter are like noon and its shadow: both imperfect and unperfected without each other. Neither do they part, nor do they meet. The painter exposes the light of the World, the poet the darkness.
The painting of Vladimir Dunjić, depicting things-beyond-seeing, bears a secret message: it intimates that the Angel of silence has descended into our labyrinth. Whether the labyrinth is a bad dream, Paradise Lost, or a difficult ordeal – it does not matter; what does matter is his arrival and our need to revert to the Invisible so that we can restore the broken link with the Complete Man. Hence we perceive in Dunjić’s paintings a sense of something all-inclusive, the whole world compressed into a fleeting moment!
The world of Dunjić’s painting is the one where all things exist simultaneously – the past, the present and the future, dreams and the waking life, day and night. Thus, in the painting "Embrace of the Angel", light comes in through a window on one side of the room, while through the other enters darkness. The room, where this sublime moment of joy, this brief encounter with Eternity, takes place, we might well think of as The Room-The World. Not only does this room exist, but it also is; it echoes with the sounds of flying swallows, which are a symbol of happiness and new life and harbingers of Eternity. The Angel has descended into a room of a tower, probably a part of the ubiquitous labyrinth, and upon his arrival, he has established a new order of things, entangled the labyrinth and created a space apart, an isolated island of hope in the world. This space could be the one within ourselves, saved from selfdestruction. In this new-found-space – the New World, we, the spectators, are aware that this world is possible, but we still doubt its existence, since in our own world we are biased, restricted, shackled, and it seems to us, through our imperfection, as if everything did not exist the way it does. However, loneliness does exist and from this picture it infiltrates us – only, the Angel of silence seems to transform it into a state of happy-go-luckiness or oblivion towars our surroundings, the world outside us, the world we have ceased to notice. Now we are aware that we are enchanted. By what? By the new-found inner resplendence. The feelings that we experience while passing through the chambers of this tower of silence bear a certain similitude to a state of relaxed ecstasy, as it were, which reminds me of a description of an imaginary castle Fonfroad in the novel "Midnight" by Julien Green. "As I was passing through those big empty chambers echoing with the sound of my footsteps, I was filled with such sweet joy that words could only feebly express this feeling. It seemed to me that I was becoming better and wiser, and that the air I was breathing at the top of my lungs was feeding my brain with some refined and magic ingredient. Many things which I had not understood before, suddenly appeared perfectly simple. Not a single wish disturbed my peace. My doubts vanished, and so did my remorse, misery and puzzlement over the question who we really are."
Everything in Dunjić’s pictures, like in this description, is silent, so silent that the inner and outer world are begining to apear as in harmony, and the feelings and movements are natural and could not be any different for they would not make sense. In these pictures there is a mood of relaxation, as if after some important event, and yet, this mood radiates something sublime and blissful, as do those people who can touch the Secret and are filled with feelings of dedication and surrender to the world beyond, the spiritual world. This is why man in these paintings often appears with his doppelganger or twin. These paintings are not about people, but about Man, more accurately the Man who has found his tower of soul and ventured into introspection which has brought him reconcilation with himself.
What is Dunjić’s world about? It is about silence, where sounds can not be heard but seen: the curtain over the window is billowing althrough there is no breeze whatsover; birds are flying, or is it just their shadows? It is about loneliness, but it is not the loneliness of those who are abandoned, forgotten and disappointed, but of those who have divined the greatest of all secrets, the secret of existence. It is about butterflies and swallows, whose presence heralds a change, a New Life, a rebirth and a spiritual metamorphosis.
In Dunjić’s world we find something that has long been buried and forgotten as a human need, something that the modern world of technology denounces as archheresy – namely, idleness. (Here it is symbolised by butterflies). Almost everything here revolves round it. Idleness is that elevated state, a stage in our passage through life, when the endless flow of time is sometimes interrupted by a sudden flash of man’s imagination which, in turn, invests idleness with virtue. The same lavish idleness (an echo of the past days) is also to be found in the pictures of Baltus, a painter akin to Dunjić, but not well-known in this country. However, Baltus’s idleness can explode with a fierce emotion, passion, a dangerous secret thought, a strong spiritual spasm or a small maelstrom, while Dunjić’s idleness is a kind of game which may lead to the discovery of some treasure that no eyes have seen yet.
Dunjić’s present oeuvre would not be complete without one picture which deserves special mention. It is The "Guardian of the Void". In the picture he is performing a senseless task. He is guarding the world which does not exist anymore, or if it does, it belongs to the past and is obsolete, anachronistic and forgotten. The guardian stands there like a small apparition from the past. With his blood-thirsty cat, an emissary of the underground world and night, he is now out of work, on a forced leave, watching over the void, which is of this world, not the other, mystic one. Alas! He cannot give up his old, intoxicating habits, and so, like a forgotten grave of the past, he stands there lonely, in the service of an evil Demiurge, waiting for a sign which will light his loyal eyes and turn them into blood-red embers. Night and day this guardian of shadows observes the depths of our dissipation and stands guard over the past, imperfection and transience – Scylla and Charybdis, so that they would not come to their death.
Dunjić’s painting reflects his need to paint a world not yet seen by anybody. I would not go so far as to say that his painting is about remembering Paradise, but it certainly is about the forgotten or abandoned secrets of man, the secrets which will restore his spiritual dignity, peace and tranquility, joy and harmony – even though, let us have no doubts, all of these will some day, within a single moment of man’s hubris, crumble to the nadir of evil, vanity, hatred and folly, thus confirming man’s curse and imperfection. This painting is, therefore, about Man’s Return. It is something we must beleive in, for it is sometimes more necessary to daydream in the lightof shadows, than to bask in glorious darkness.
February 17–18, 1994
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