#5 In his “white phase” Mazev is preoccupied with the tranquil scenery of the monasteries, the surrounding landscapes, the walls, the gates, the dormitories, the mornings, the festivals and the memories. In these spaces, where the time seems to have stopped, he begins the act of dissecting and analyzing. Thus he reveals the soul of these historically and artistically hued regions, he paints their portraits: how far has the power of corrosion gone, the devastating influence of the wormholes, the impact of the dampness upon the wall, the mould and the lichen upon the stone, the effect of the flame upon the colors, the wood and the varnish on the icons or frescoes. The artist seems to believe in a certain power which might stop the ravages of time and natural phenomena. On his canvass discretely sprout red, orange, yellow or violet stains and the fields are turning yellow, while the wheat is ripening. The associations take us further towards certain bird’s-eye perspectives of organized natural entities, intermediated by human hand, a processed geography which acquires a Monrdian-ish iconicity.7F
#6 The Informal paste in Mazev’s paintings is part of the world artistic brotherhood. It is organized in a way which also includes the notion of abstract landscape, of the kind applied by painters like Ubac, Prassinos, Mušić, Tàpies, Bourrit… Mazev makes applications, collages or assemblages of paint, singed or natural wood, cracked boards, sand, pearls, etc. He implements the trivial into the sublime. The rough structure (relief, granulations, uneven areas) requires a rigorous composition of the canvas, organized according to a wider or shifted (fine disregard) or, as already mentioned, Mondrian-ish concept. The impression of reservation, strictness, pregnancy, asceticism is achieved by a minimalistic use of paint. Vlada Urošević was among the first to refer to this phase as white because of the domination of white, because the other colors were mainly used as accents of a secondary significance. The meditative, contemplative spirit “releases the painting of the verbal correlative”. It is necessary to constantly research the reason for the birth of these artworks: is it the psychic tranquility of the artist in the ascetic regions of Macedonia, the wish to join the spirit of time inclined to non-referential views or the inability of the artist to retain a unique style horizontal and his aptness to experiment. A constant research is required in order to get as true as possible answer to the original ontological status of the best Informal Art paintings (with matter) in our art history and also in Mazev’s painting opus.8F In these works, Mazev creates a union of fragments of gates, walls, ceilings, frescoes and icons – he edits them into a certain scheme or organization. When Julija Kristeva uses the notion of inter-textuality,9F she thinks that “each text is conceived as a mosaic of quotations, each text is an absorption and a transformation of another text.” If we apply this to the case of Mazev, we might say that his “white phase”, as no other phase before and after, is a mosaic of quotations from the childhood, of sacred ambiances and objects, of absorption of the monastery interior / exterior structures of an emphasized past time and their transformation into modern projects via the Mondrian system.
#7 It is a fact that the artworks of Mazev’s white phase are very complex constructs which also include the tradition, but they also include the power of vivisection of the actual feeling of time and matter: to say something else without talking solely about the tradition. The Informal Art of Mazev is at the same time a high point of achieved artistic freedom, related to the esthetics of both the beautiful and the ugly. The artist does not paint in the time when he can drastically, radically stay apart from the phenomena of the national and the beautiful, and wants to meet the universe of the ugly, the rough, the rustical, with a protest against the established codes. Therefore, the most correct critical axiology in this case would be the state of ambiguity. Almost all of the critics where partially right with their conclusions, same as Mazev was right to plunge into the adventure of research and set seams between the unavoidable past and the challenging future. I think that with this act he made a kind of a cult, a paradigm of this exhibition by leaving traces in the artworks of the other artists and thus setting a kind of a continuity in the Macedonian contemporary fine art. It is only the artistic formula, form, behavior which has elements of the known and yet, still promoted as novelty, that can leave traces and influences. This was the case with Mazev. It should be noted that it was the time when it was not very popular to discuss religions, churches and any religious objects which were inappropriate to the communism as a system. So, this artist was caught in the middle. The circumstances were such, especially the suggestions of the Marshal: have in mind the actual time. In that sense, he said: “I want to bring the new painting closer to the icon, to the wall, to the door. I want to capture the patina of time which had left its mark on the walls and doors, which is obvious in the objects which have not been renovated, the old churches and monasteries, with wormholes and dirt. My white is not utterly white, as you can see. It is stained, same as those objects.”10F It is a fact that his white is stained and it could possibly refer to Bataille’s statement that the Informal Art is a horizontal noting. With this statement he confirms the credo of the Informal artists. The writer Paskal Gilevski euphemistically commented the dirt from this Mazev’s confession as “monastery negligence”.
#8 Mazev perceives both men and the world dialectically, in cyclical exchange, in their entirety as a montage of oppositions: the discontinuity, the cracks, the lines, the diaspora, the borders on the one hand, and the happy unions and seams on the other hand… Maybe in the background of this lies the intention to release a life on a higher level from the necessary evil, the emptiness and the darkness. In the ripe breath of the Overripe Wheat the matter becomes the alpha and omega, a superstructure and a reason for the endurance of the Informal treatment. This attitude questions the existence of the artworks as “appropriateness without a purpose” (Immanuel Kant), on “loving the music for its own sake”11F, for its fantasy, on the mystical asceticism of the art, without a topic, text or meaning, or the free artistic being in itself as not representing anything. Mazev’s paintings, considering the very fact of adopting of the representational and the abstract idiom, are not and could not be black consciousness, “appropriateness without a purpose”, nor can they be representatively or mimetically connoted. The origin of his Informal idiom is not in the “negation of the conditions of non-freedom and alienation”12F, it is not in the European philosophy of the crisis or the existentialistic ideas; it is not in the “desperate revolt of the artists and the intellectuals against the system that dismisses the artists and the intellectuals who don’t agree to ‘join’ and serve the purposes of the authorities of the advanced capitalism.”13F This is why his Informal idiom is not purely abstract: because it is “understood as pure existence”, it is not “non-geometrical” (unlike the world one) because it still has ideas; it is not “non-objective” because he does not consider the artwork as a “bare moment of existence”; and finally, this Informal idiom of his “is a language” because it sets a communication and because it is not “pure being”. There is no doubt that this painting with matter (same as its phenomenological evolution into a certain kind of associative figuration) “does not assume a certain renewed trust in the values of the meaning of the form”. But in this sense, on such an Informal Art background, he “still treats the human figure as a mater.”
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7. “… In the colorist expression of the profusely differentiated white gradations in his, so called, white phase one could see an artistic poetics as a result of an organized action, obvious at some points of the paintings which even point to a certain, more or less emphasized geometric order. It seems that in this painting imagination there was a balance set between the organic which was provocative for him in the pretexts of nature and the action of the organizational geometric spirit. The order of these white poeticized conditions, included into a clear composition, was concise and simply perceptible.” Perčinkov, Dušan, in: Revisiting the moments of mutual collaboration, Memories of Petar Mazev, Council of the municipality of Kavadarci, prepared by Kiril Temkov, PhD, Kavadarci 2005, p. 106; “The two ranges are an utterly visual touch of solid-soft, structural-harder and softer matter (structurally harder and softer emotion). In this merciless cleansing of the anecdotic aspect, I see a basically Mondrian-ish tendency, raising to a pure plasticism, with Mazev taken as an emotional product. While with Mondrian it is a result of an intellectual asceticism and tends to be impersonal, with Mazev it is extremely personal and emotionally defined, related to a distant associative source, juice, mood, character of an authentic landscape…” Čemerski, Gligor, in: Raising to the painting, Razgledi, Skopje, 1960, p. 226.
8. “Petar Mazev tends to show a picture of Macedonia, rather subjective, yet delicate and refined in confronting the discrete, almost Informal areas.” Vasić, Pavle, in: The time of young artists, Politika, Belgrade, 1.03.1969, 19901, p. 11; On the occasion of the exhibition of young artists in Rome, Dario Micacchi says: “Petar Mazev in his mysterious naturalism and with the blinding whiteness of the monastery walls distinguishes from the other participants.” Micacchi, Dario, in Illustratori socialisti e informali macedoni, L’Unita, Roma, 15.12.1965, p. 8; On the occasion of the exhibition in Nürnberg of six young Macedonian artists, the author with the initials F. G. says: “The meditations of a monk, this is what the two-dimensional abstraction of Mazev are. They associate of light, white as lime, and the meekness of the monastery cell where the mortar has fallen of, with charred and worm-eaten wood of the icon lurking from it, same as with Bourrit. It is like a game with the transitoriness of all of the earthly things, as if he is aware of the opposition of the material in the matter and the spiritual in the color.” In: F. G. Malerei und Plastik aus Mazedonien, Nürnberger Nachrichten, Nürnberg, 9-11.04.1966, 82, p. 17; “The white color has always been his obsession. It helped our entire generation of the 1960s to reveal the tradition. We traveled through Macedonia, we saw the monasteries and the painting in them. He used to paint in their dormitories as early as then. He helped us discover the frescoes as no historian before that, in his own way, through friendly conversations. Later we revealed this space by ourselves. It was only later that I understood his white paintings: they were the monastery walls. He was among the first in the 1960s to point the most tragically white paintings in our country.” Temkova, Ana, in: Clips of a friendship, Revisiting the moments of mutual collaboration, Memories of Petar Mazev, Council of the municipality of Kavadarci, prepared by Kiril Temkov, PhD, Kavadarci, 2005, p. 89.
9. J. Kristeva is under the influence of the literary theory of Mikhail Bahtin and his dialogical principle.
10. Sp(irkoska) Olga: Petar Mazev: I’m preoccupied with the white color, in: Nova Makedonija, Skopje, 30.07.1965, 6748, p. 4.
11. Stravinsky, Igor, in: My understanding of music, Zodijak, Belgrade, 1966, p. 10.
12. Carlo, Giulio Argan, in: Texts on the modern art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 1983, p. 21.
13. Ibid, p. 33.