Conversation with Petar Mazev 1989/90

/, Gallery, Blesok no. 116/Conversation with Petar Mazev 1989/90

Conversation with Petar Mazev 1989/90

Conversation with Petar Mazev 1989/90


SAD: The interweaving of black and red stresses and makes the conflict which is inherent in your painting more convincing.

PM: My expressiveness is itself full of conflicts – internal conflicts reflected on the canvas. If the palette is faint, soundless, the conflict, too, is weaker – as for instance in my painting Caryatid. I very rarely work according to a concept, as for example in my paintings Insect or Migrations – the latter was shown at the DLUM exhibition (1989).

SAD: But this remains your secret. When the observer compares these paintings with the others he could not notice the difference.

PM: Even when I paint with a concrete idea or goal, I cannot narrate. Even when I know the story in advance, the result is the same as in the paintings on which I work in a purely intuitive way. The important thing for me is to enter the canvas wholly, with nothing left out. Such is my nature. But, in a way, each painting is narration. Yet, some artists synthesize this in a few words, and everybody remembers it. Some artists narrate in volumes and they are boring to me.

SAD: Just like in haiku poetry – a feeling, a challenge rhymed in three verses – short, compact and effective. So the subject is of secondary importance to you. In your latest works you seem to have gone further with this view – there are dense, tense paintings charged with energy?

PM: I am the laboratory where all the decisions are made. This has come .spontaneously to me – unplanned. I carry that in me. In the evening I watch the density of the darkness, the sky and stars, I feel light. The question is not only in the colour, but also in the fluid, the light and the earth’s density. When I look at the sky, however cloudy it may be, it is soft compared to the firm material quality of 11th This is the conflict I am now interested in, but on the canvas it becomes my vision, a subjective reality.

SAD: Your paintings radiate an emphasized erotic charge which has a destructive quality in contrast to the classical erotic tradition in visual arts. Why such density of eroticism?

PM: Eroticism represents a large part of me; the more concentrated it is the clearer It I shown on the canvas. I consider it my fuel in the creative process. I do not run away from it; on the contrary, I stir it up even more. My act of painting, too, has erotic characteristics.

SAD: You give interesting names to your paintings. How do you give them to your works, a priori or a posteriori?

PM: I mainly give them after I have finished the painting. With the act of giving it a name I complete my painting. It all goes together. For instance Love in Hell – it is something entirely abstract, isn’t it?

SAD: Figurative painting yes, figurative painting no. Then, in 1968, you linked the yes and no into one. Ever since, for two decades, you have stood on the position yes – no. Did this reconciliation of the opposition mean that you had realized the absurdity of dividing the abstract and the concrete? Nowadays everybody sees the nonsense of that either – or standpoint.

P’M: It is all experience. At one time the trend was more important than the outcome. This was a sign of quest, of curiosity in me. The moment of maturity came when I became indifferent to the division ‘abstraction – figuration’, or their unification and blending.

SAD: How do you look at tradition?

PM: We have no tradition in modern painting. I am not referring to Byzantium, which was a long time ago. Leaning on it nowadays is like starting to re-work Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And it is perfect, so pure and innocent. By way of selection through time, Byzantium came to the highest spiritual qualities. It seems untouchable to me.

2018-09-20T12:33:07+00:00 October 21st, 2017|Categories: Reviews, Gallery, Blesok no. 116|0 Comments