Artist

Vladimir Dunjić (1957)

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The waters at the edge of the world

Speaking about paintings makes just as much sense as trying to pre­sent a philosophical concept in a painting. We must never stop talking about it, though. Since the picture is more obvious than speech and text – as we are not capable of immediate comprehension – we are forced to venture the discursive, constantly in danger of making even more distant what we wish to bring closer. Our epoch is so impregnated and obsessed by the visual that hardly anything remains visible. Since there is always the possibility that the painted shades which it represents, the Old Testament forbid "graven images", and art as such, because the noun "image" comprises two diametrically opposed phenomena not easily distinguishable. On the one hand, there is "image" as an idol – the mask of death as opposed to "image" as an icon – shining of life. The former "image" is the border of this world, the closing of the shell, the beginning of the process of petrification. The latter "image" is the border of the other world within this world, a window with an opaque panes through which the otherness is tempting us.

Vladimir Dunjić’s paintings belong to icons and it will soon be clear why.

When I met Dunjić, it was the beginning of the eighties – the motif prevailing in his canvasses was snail shells from which occasionally a human image appeared. In the light of, a now nearly forgotten tradition, the snail is a symbol of wisdom that can only be acquired through patience and spiritual growth, which is, again, connected with the symbolism of a spiral, hidden in the structure of a calcified shell. Let us allegorically see Dunjić’s first cycle as liberation from Babylonian slavery of Euclidean figuration, which is the figuration based on the premise that nothing exists beyond the visible world. Such geometry and such figuration are emplo­yed by architecture and ideology, but are of no use for art. It was the solidification, canonization and erroneous beatification of the "tangible" that led the art of painting astray, which it attempted to leave by further decomposition of painting through various "isms", beginning with the impressionism, tho­rough cubism, to abstraction and conceptualism. Without wishing to deny a somewhat decorative and possible market value for such works of art, we have to say that they are not too far away from the original purpose of painting as art which is immanently sacral. Vladimir Dunjić has – by having decided to explore the Vertical – since the very beginning shown that the path he intends to tread leads back to the origin of painting, to the sacral, to the vertical. Euclid has been misinterpreted in that respect and consequently a generally approved opinion today is that the Vertical is a straight line which forms a right angle with a horizontal line. Spiritually, however, the Vertical is better represented as a spiral, the alternative which is indicated by even a simplistic etymology: "vertical" is clo­sely related to the words vertigo (giddiness), vortex (whirlpool), virtus (virtue), ver (spring) veritas (truth) and many other words linked by the idea of power, renewal and truthfulness. Hegel once defined a sphinx as "humanity rising from the animalism". Similarly, Dunjić’s spiral cycle may be defined as "human spiritualism rising painstakingly from the biologic humanity". No wonder those paintings were created in Čačak, then, undo­ubtedly, the esoteric cen­tre of Serbian spirituality, presented by the "Gradac" magazine where, on the Eve of the Big Fall, in an almost mystical way, Christian East and West are brought together. Dunjić’s later paintings are all marked by that syntheses. Since the synthesis with Dunjić is the result of an authentic inner ini­tiation, the final result is far from syncretism or eclecticism (so typical of our contemporary artists), but, just as all true synthesis do, erase the differences between the synthesized materials bring­ing about new quality.

Should I, as a non-expert in matters of painting, be allowed to speak about painting, I would say that in Dunjić’s vision of the world the portrayal of human figures is based upon he best experiences of Western paint­ing, whilst the depiction of nature and architecture (and the relationship man-nature and man-city) belongs to the Byzantine school of painting. Dunjić would certainly rather paint humans in the Byzantine style. Being aware, however, of the fact that such figures are no longer part of this dis­integrated world of ours, he elegantly avoided the ever-present risk of reproduction. It is not the duty of an artist to show the aspects of spirituality of the past – that is the duty of theologists – but, in the world and man falling deeper and deeper, to break through the layers of solidified nothingness and reach the remaining spirituality.

Today’s low level of spirituality is the cause of deep melancholy which dominates Dunjić’s recent paintings.

Despite the Fall, the structure of the universe has remained, as oppo­sed to the impression of inversion which results from a certain materialization of illusion. Vladimir Dunjić is fully aware of the fact, so in his paintings, similarly to early icons, the human figure is superior to space, dimensions and nature, a practice abandoned in the Western tradition long before the Renaissance when man, as a crown of Creation, was submitted to plausible laws of perspective in the aesthetics, namely, to the tyranny of the material in an ontological sense. Although men lost their inner light (see icons), they are still above the world of animals and the material. With Du­njić, the human figure is still a focal point, the interface of the material world and higher spheres of existence.

One of the most outstanding symbols in Dunjić’s paintings is water, the archetypal symbolism of which is well recognized. However, the water in those paintings is not "the water above which the spirit rose". That is the water of the contemporary world: muddy, dark, polluted – not by wa­ste, as is often believed – but by the solipsism of modern man who is also convincingly presented in Dunjić’s paintings. In those waters at the end of the world we do, however, find human figures, alone or in groups, trying to reach spiritual purification. In one painting – the name of which I cannot, unfortunately, recall – we find, astoundingly, a vivid archetypical sce­ne of Genesis: the town is in the background (Babylon?) in the dark purple light. (The red is, by the way, the last colour of the visible spectrum, behind which the area of infra-red and entropy begins). The lower half of the town’s walls are I merged in the dark water, from which a tree is rising (The tree of life!), leafless. In the water, as in the opaque mirror, we see the reflection of equally dark skies covered with dark clouds and the reflection of the moon, the symbol of the sub-lunar state of the modern world.

In such a world, naturally, only loneliness is certain, both inner loneliness and the loneliness of the urban world in which people are separated by the walls of small cells. In Vladimir Dunjić’s paintings there is no communication amongst the figures, not even between twins. The figures have no mutual relationships, similarly to the lack of communication or relationships on this side of the paintings, as they have been replaced by dead patterns in the whirlpool of general simulation. Things have gone so far that this truth can only been conveyed through poetry or painting. Poets seem to have given up trying. Vladimir Dunjić has not. And he will not, as it seems. That is why I am looking forward to the next stage of his painting adventure.


Svetislav Basara

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