Kavadarci, 1940 – Skopje, 2016
One of the spiritual followers of the great Nikola Martinoski is the painter Gligor Chemerski. With a discourse in context of his age, the taste of the generation and the mood of the time, he created within the new figuration, popular then in the former SFRY. With an accentuated color scope, in the beginning with a mild differentiation of the grounds and soft tone shades (Goat 1963, Nest Keeper 1964, Summer Flame 1968, The Boy and the Goat 1969) he glorified the idyllic world of vegetation, fauna and (man) child. The pleasure instinct, dispersed though the games, fold dances and dances, motivated by the pagan/mythological celebrations is transformed into a real life metaphor. The erotic color of the atmosphere (Twilight Dance 1975, Satyr 4 1979, The Garden of Love 1982) and the passionate pulsations of the dancers repeat and renew the times in which fulfillment and happiness ruled the nature. Therefore the optical structure of the canvas does not differentiate the grounds (background from foreground); on the contrary, they converge at a two-dimensional level. The linear games on the canvas (as well as their independent existence on the grafiki, mosaics and drawings that he creates parallel to the oil or acrylic canvases), regardless of their intensity, neutralize the illusion of depth. The stressed dreaming, esthetics of the sensual chronologically fit the personalization of the themes dedicated to Macedonian religious iconographic tradition, especially the mourning scenes of St. Panteleymon monastery in Nerezi (The Kurbinovo Angel 1982, Lamentation 1995). The same artistic semantics is also applied in the works inspired by the great masters (Rembrandt, Uccello). Chemerski’s modernism has not reached the final point – it is not a closed project. The citations from painting history used are only postmodern virtues. How can one otherwise understand the lamentations, the saints and martyrs in his paintings, but as a wish to touch the initial truth? The artistic representation, believing in the painting ontology, by recalling and stressing the former cry, the Nereska paradigm, is passing through the purgatory of the civilization history in order to renew the personal and collective awareness. The quest for the primordial also penetrates in the layers of the psychological structure of the ego, down to the depth of one’s own birth.