The Cruelty of the Beautiful

/, Gallery, Blesok no. 64/The Cruelty of the Beautiful

The Cruelty of the Beautiful

“Calme, Luxe et Volupté”
“Là tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté”

Charles Baudelaire

#6 Petković touches upon the tradition but – in what form? As the old adage of Goethe has it, everything is already done and yet, the thing is in the capability of an artist to see in a personal way that which is familiar. “… Every creative spirit is struggling its forerunners but it cannot do without them. History evolves through a constant, reoccurring writing of the past: it is not enough for a man to be original since a proof is required that the works of one’s precursors are preparing one’s proper work which, in its own turn, stands for overcoming the past achievements as both, confirmation and abolition of theirs.”10F Petković’s understanding of the cultural heritage is that of a translation or interpretation, not as something preserved for eternity.11F He is interpreting the tradition as something coming from the past which is concurrently belonging to the present times – because, in the words of Italo Calvino, “the memory is concealed beneath layers of fragmented imagery as if it were a waste ground wherein for a figure to emerge above the rest is becoming an ever more arduous feat.”12F Although Petković is maintaining a close relation with the modernism, the fact of being dissatisfied with himself and having no sense of belonging13F directed his search for the ideal of the beauty towards particular artists, whose work he succeeded to internalize without sympathizing and replicating and to whom he only sought to preserve a transcendental relation. His preferred artists are the greats such as Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Alexandre Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana – all renowned by their scrupulous aesthetical adherence. To the first three of the above mentioned artists Petković dedicated respectively his three series abounding in oil paintings, drawings or collages. The essential in this case is to accurately assess the kind of relation this artist aimed to establish. Immediately one needs to discard the lexical entries such as imitation, quoting, mimicking and impersonating. Maybe assimilation is a more accurate formulation14F, #7 but I would rather name this connection as dialogic, simply because Petković manages to establish an essential communication with his colleagues, he actually creates in parallel with them as an ally, as being of the same mind, as someone sharing their sensibility – certainly not as a prisoner laying in their shadow or as a devotee who would uncritically rip off pieces suitable to the proper artistic outlook. Since he is not a post-modernist or a snap-shooter of cut-and-paste variety, his focus remains affixed on that overwhelming feeling he gets while analyzing certain parts of the antecedent imagery. Most often it is to do with this artist’s approach towards the phenomenological details: with Matisse it is the joyous color, the gaiety of the line and that distancing step away from the anachronic bond between the drawing and the skin of the format – actually, it is the departure from the four dimensions of the painting and the development of its subsequent extension into the space; with Courbet or Fontana, for that matter, it is about the slit that is concurrently striving towards the deep and crawling over the surface; with Monet it is to do with the sense of varying rhythms of the delicate cobwebby line and the overall diffusion of the view; with Reinhardt it is the usage of white as a condition of visibility and not as a signifier; with Rodchenko it is the absolute purity of the color. All of these points of interest are united by an extreme simplicity, by some painterly Dadaism which is limited to a certain phenomena and is breathing through a rather simple form. Would it be far fetching if we are led to believe that Petković absorbs on a nearly somatic level that feeling of abstract beautiful which he unearths with these artists, and that he is doing all this in order to subsequently rework his discovery in an aesthetic model of his own – a model which is in visual terms or by its contents incompatible with the source? This here is, fortunately, not an exaggeration because out of these excerpts, which are culled from the native context of the few poetic contributions, Petković is generating his conceptual model of beauty: that of making an idea from the original model or “intellectualizing” the raw material which was severed from parts of the modern masters’ artistic system.
#8 My attention is retained by the relational analysis of the artist and the three prominenti of the modern painting: Matisse, Monet and Courbet – the masters to which he also dedicated three following series of works: The Joy of Life (1984), According to Monet (1997/2004) and According to Courbet (1995/1997). These series contain the explicit conceptualization of the beauty. Thus, as a most suitable form of my research I have opted for the formula which is comprised in the Baudelaire’s spleen, and which is brilliantly articulated in the words LUXE, CALME, VOLUPTÉ from the poem L’Invitation à voyage. The first word (LUXURY) pertains to Matisse, the second (CALMNESS) refers to Monet, while the third word (VOLUPTUOUSNESS) applies to Courbet: those are the three discourses that while different in their appearance, are standing close in their sensuous and emotional transposition of the aesthetic idea.

Luxe
“To use green greener than nature”

Paul Cézanne
“I achieved a very rare voluptuousness and elegance of line. I poured my entire sensibility into them …”
Henri Matisse

#9 In times when modernists were marginalizing the phenomenon of the beautiful in art, Matisse was firmly inserting himself into its core. The sincerity of that deliberation is due to the natural need of being close to the beauty in order to be happy. The beauty’s quality is transcending stylistic categories and movements as if it were something innate to the life itself. As early as 1976/7 and especially during 1984/5, that is, when the majority of artists was shunning away from the exploration of beauty’s territory, Petković was painting his attractive monochromes and decorative cut-outs, thus demonstrating that – at the end of the day – the beauty is related to the wealth and complexity of expression. Only much later, the critics all over the world had to reconsider their attitude as to their evaluation of this category in the works of Matisse, of Minimal Art adherents or Post-Modernist. Even those floral patterns, as well as the ornamental and decorative instances, which are obviously present with both, Matisse and Petković, critics were interpreting in a rosy outlook and through euphemisms.15F From the piece Le Bonheur de Vivre which he painted at the age of thirty five, up until the cut-outs which he made at the rather advanced age of over eighty, Henri Matisse considered his interest to be unchanged “because all this time I was exploring the same things that I just might have done in different ways”.16F In course of the mid-eighties of the past century, Dragan Petković had set to unite these two examples from the work of the great Matisse: the Joy of Life effectively reduced to the cut-outs. The synthesis of this master’s two extreme discourses – the expressiveness of color-form (as generated by the Fauvism) and the geometric minimalism – is standing in support of the skilled translation of the tradition into a proper discourse. Petković is building a unity out of this ostensible difference, especially since he himself, not unlike his elder colleague, spent his entire life in thinking beauty as the topos of the creation.
10# That which binds together these two painters on a visual plane is to be reduced to the usage of the pure color, to the dynamics of the gesture, to the stress upon the decorative aspects, to the usage of unpainted parts of the canvas as an extension of space and its airiness. Petković is refuting the significance of form because he finds its alternative in the independence of perduring gesture and line, which is pasted over the wall’s surface as a cut-out. Acting as a huge canvas which is compromising that received and rather limiting definition of painting-as-window, the arrangement of cut-outs across the wall offers a de-centered and wider view: the joy is not standing for a concentration in a single point but in the manifold of views.17F The essential collaboration with Matisse takes shape of a glowing singing, of a musicality in the atmosphere emanating the bliss, of some heaven on earth, of sorts – it is, in the words of Robert Rosenblum, a hedonistic gratification shaped as a “pictorial equivalent of the high gastronomy or fashion”.18F The imagery from Dragan Petković’s cycle Joy of Life19F is offering a festive appearance. It is to do with an outpour of fire, of yearnings, lust and eroticism, of bacchanal celebrations and follies coming from an artist that was hitherto unknown as homo ludens. If by his preferred imagery and analytical proclivity Petković makes part of the modernist family, then he is truly distant from the modernism as much as Matisse is when it comes to embracing those unfashionable relations with emotions and beauty. Both are exploiting that pleasure, above all, that pleasure of the desire which is stated with power and conviction – in different ways, with different means and techniques. Only their motive remains the same. While Matisse failed to achieve the effect of the pure form as “presentation of the desire without the object of the desire”20F Petković appears to be closer to this goal, by reducing the emotional aspect to a form which is set free from the reference.
#b
10. Марио Перниола, Естетика Двадесетог века, Светови, Нови Сад, 2005, p. 202/3;
11. Cf. Op. cit. No. 3 (Ханс Георг Гадамер, Актуелноста на убавото …) p. 128;
12. Итало Калвино, Американски предавања, Темплум, Скопје, p. 113;
13. Cf. Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 24-27;
14. This term is used by E. H. Gombrich In: Norm&Form, London, Phaidon, 1966, p. 123 (“as the bee transforms nectar into honey, or as the body assimilates its nourishment”);
15. Cf. John Perreault, The Cultivated Canvas, In: Art in America, New York, No 3, March 1982, p. 100;
16. Cf. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1993, p. 54;
17. Leaving unpainted, white stretches on the canvas was initiated as a procedure by Cézanne, while Y-A. Bois is calling this jumpy procedure;
18. Robert Rosenblum, Matisse: A Symposium, In: Art in America, No. 5, 1993, p. 75;
19. His first work on this topic is dating from 1976;
20. Donald Kuspit, Armchair Agonist, In: Art Forum, New York, October, 1992, p. 95.

2018-08-21T17:23:00+00:00 March 3rd, 2009|Categories: Reviews, Gallery, Blesok no. 64|0 Comments