#7 Although the Macedonian post-war art had been for already for three decades under the absolute domination of the abstract art, the occurrence of this self-reflexive painting of Dragan Petković introduced a radically new attitude, a significantly different understanding of the painting and the art of painting in comparison to that tradition.8F Namely, since the beginning of the 1960s the Macedonian art has been developing under the influence of the late European Modernism in its less radical, lyrical variants as derivatives of the Paris school, where the painting, although reduced to abstract image, is still a kind of an imitation or direct association of motifs from nature or real objects, somewhere shown as abstract landscape, somewhere through the language of symbols, and somewhere as a personal expression of those natural experiences. The support of the Abstract Expressionism and the analytical occurrences of the post-minimalism, which are part of Dragan Petković’s experience, are opposite to that kind of thinking. According to that attitude, painting is determined by the awareness that it is part of the historical experience and therefore the question of the illusion of the natural phenomena is completely pushed aside or does not exist at all, making room for the emphasis of the principles of the modernist theory of the pictorial which treat the painting background and the stroke as autonomous, that is, independent elements of the plastic organism which exists in the real space of its background. In other words, we might say that with the painting of Dragan Petković the circle of questions on the modernity in the Macedonian post-war art was definitely closed, regardless of the fact that that chain probably lacks some other important links. But what is also interesting is the fact that this work is also a symptom of a caesura or the shift into the age of post-modernism which begins at the exhibition Six Macedonian Artists in the second half of the 1980s, one of the most dynamic periods in the Macedonian contemporary art.
#8 The cycle The Joy of Life actually seemed also like a caesura in relation to the other works of Petković. The cardboard Matisse-like cutouts or “decoupages”, formed in a kind of indefinite quasi-anthropo/zoomorphic figures filled with shiny day-glow colors, were a somewhat unusual shift compared to his earlier artistically refined and always maximally finished abstract paintings and drawings.9F Besides, their daringly direct decorativeness and aptness for a kind of narrativity in the arrangement and the inter-relations of their setting on the walls was certainly not something that belonged to the repertoire of the abstract purism of any kind, but mostly to the enthusiasm of the liberating impulses of the “new image painting”, which partially touched the works of Petković, as well, and which made almost senseless the dogmas of the opposed couples abstract-figurative and their style variants.
#9 Although the arrangement of the parts is variable and dependant on the space, the cycle The Joy of Life still includes a composition which is in the epicenter and which radiates with strokes/figures in their joyous dance: it is an ellipse of seven cutouts which follows the form and the rhythm of The Dance by Henry Matisse (La danse, from 1909 and 1919), the artwork which was derived from the painting Le bonheur de vivre from 1905/06 where Matisse pictures scenes filled with eroticism, happiness, beauty and “physiological ‘pleasure in life’, by way of analogy with the body.”10F The ecstatic rhythm of the movement of the strokes/figures in the work of Petković, their powerful, even explosive expansion or cutting into the wall mass was undoubtedly provoked and driven by the same Matisse-like principle of the erotic and “physiological” pleasure in life and in painting.
#10 Nevertheless, what I want to point here is that behind the initial seductiveness of the “new painting” wave, in these works of Petković I can discern some other important components that should participate in the interpretation and evaluation of his work and the relations he establishes in the given context. First of all, I think that the initial impetus for Petković’s cycle came from the wall and spatial drawings of the Macedonian sculptor Gligor Stefanov, exhibited at one of the important exhibitions in the 1980s, the site-specific installation Linear Intervention, set in the Youth Center in 1983. 11F In these spatial inversions consisting of spatial drawings and rods Stefanov managed to provoke with the viewer a feeling of a two-dimensional space where the viewer is also turned into a kind of a body/drawing in the flat real space. It had a considerable impact on this and on the somewhat younger generation of artists regarding an altered understanding of the sculpture and the nearing of the two media of sculpture and painting, which will be practiced in the art of the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s. For Dragan Petković this experience was probably a stimulus to return, on the one hand, to the ideas conceived in one of his unfinished projects on upgrading of his abstract paintings into spatial/architectural installations (Variations on a Given Topic and Continuance, pl. 17 – 23); on the other hand, he set to rendering the drawing as an engraved “allover” network made of his initial paintings (see pl. 5 and 7), which, of course, refer to the abstract expressionists, but also to the Matisse-like “invention of erasing the traditional distinctions between drawing and color”12F by means of dividing the colored areas. So, the cardboard cutouts were basically devised as fragmentary separated and enlarged strokes/gestures, which in a dynamic game of illusions turn the walls and the space into a painterly conceived and desired totality, bursting at times as engraved notches, and at times as projecting relieves, leaving it to our gaze to decide what is the background and what is the stroke/figure, a procedure known from the Gestalt psychology and which resembles the child’s experiences of gazing into the wall spots which turn into figures in the imagination.
#11 Only a few years later and especially following the exhibition of the six artists, the ambience in the Macedonian art encountered drastic changes. The occurrence of a large group of young artists educated at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje induced great creative energy and quick changes which followed the spirit of the nomadic, inconsistent and fickle 1980s. The deconstruction of the solid modernist discourses by way of ready-made answers to the painting problems and the emphasis on the objectiveness of the painting and the melting of the traditional media were some of the main currents towards the art of the 1990s and the end of the century. The works of Dragan Petković were part of these events, but it seems that some of the dilemmas that were aroused in the cycle The Joy of Life, like for example falling into figurative narration or drawing descriptiveness, made him continue to deal with the problems of painting from the point he had started from: the two-dimensional surface and the autonomy of the medium. In a sense, the works of Petković remained close, although on a rather intuitive and formal level than actually theoretically supported, to the concurrent researches of his generation colleagues from Slovenia who worked within the frames of the psychoanalytical Lacanian theory and in general sense within the frames of the concept of the “Modernism after the Postmodernism”, as the renowned Slovenian critique and theoretician Tomaž Brejc13F has defined it.
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8. It was noted by some of the Macedonian critics, like for example Konča Pirkovska who wrote in 1982: “Such artworks are not typical for our artistic ambience”, in Petković Dragan – sliki i skulpturi, Youth Center “25th of May”, Skopje, 1982; Sonja Abadjieva considered it “an anomaly or irregularity”, having in mind the level of “deviating from the artistic norms of the milieu”, in: Sonja Abadjieva Dimitrova, Dragan Petković, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, 1984.
9. In his book dedicated to the post-modernism of the 1980’s Nebojša Vilić describes this Petković’s shift “quite unexpected and beyond the logic and the tendencies in his art…”, in Nebojša Vilić, States of Changes? Postomodernizmot i umetnosta na osumdesettite, Feniks, Skopje, 1994, p. 195.
10. John Elderfield, Describing Matisse, in: Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1992, p. 54. Elderfield actually draws his reference to the physiological pleasure from the American critic Leo Steinberg who is comparing the way the forms of the figures are organized and deployed in Le Bonheur de vivre with “a circulatory system, as … of the blood, where stoppage at any point implies a pathological condition”.
11. After Skopje, the installation Linear Intervention was set in the Gallery of the Students’ Center in Zagreb in 1984 and in the Students’ Cultural Center in Belgrade in 1984.
12. Yves-Alain Bois, The Matisse System, Artforum, New York, October 1992, p. 92. In conclusion to this paragraph Bois writes: “For me this invention represents a gigantic leap in the history of painting, an extremely serious blow against the dualistic tradition of Western thought (spirit and matter, idea and form, drawing and color). It was a blow that was only begun to be understood later on by Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. It represent, in short, a fundamental attack on the idealist division between conception and realization: if a color has no identity before it covers a certain quantity of surface, it cannot be thought up beforehand.”
13. Tomaž Brejc, Modernizam posle modernizma? (Modernism After Modernism?), Moment, 11/12, Beograd 1988, p. 12-16.