#11 To the French artist, the vision of ideal world takes shape in “making art for pleasure and happiness as a defense from the misery and tragedy of the world”.21F He aims “through art to bestow happiness to the others. Although he was living in tragic times he did not gave up the optimism and enthusiasm, as he wanted to damp out man’s pains with the beauty in art”.22F Matisse himself actually felt lonely and thorn apart by inner conflicts. Maybe that is explaining his statement that his art has to perform “a role which is more therapeutic than an aesthetic one”. In order to retain his sanity he was idealizing art as a beauty capable to overcome the illness and despair. Robert Kushner is reading into this “the feeling of melancholy” which is pertaining to the majority of paintings and which is something that many others did not take notice of.23F Behind Matisse’s works ennobled with happiness and joy – apart from his fragile health which caused his acquittal from the compulsory military service – there is actually a disorder in his family life, a series of surgeries, the frustrations by the war, etc.24F This explains the exchange of dissonances in life with the harmony in art, of difficulties with joy, of complexity with simple visual lettering. In times when Joy of life takes over the entirety of his being, Petković is truly experiencing a condition of great happiness, of gratification by the topic he is working on and of satisfaction with his autochthonous advancing in devising the language as inspired by Matisse. It appears as if some of the less pleasurable moments of his life25F were pushed at the margins of his attention. Later, in the 1990s, a deep feeling of melancholy bordering the depression will make the repressed negativities to resurface although not sufficiently to disrupt the concept of continual blossoming of beauty on the canvases. Were the unpleasant moments, same as with Matisse, impregnated with the thought that the art is a regimen for troubles?
#12 The impression of luxury is also due to the rich sound of pure paints (red, green, yellow, blue), which are, for the first and last time, so resonating and intensive as if they were the triumph of an unlimited gratification. The artist’s palette, which is organized in dynamically controlled gestures, is shamelessly opening up towards an affluent ornamental aesthetics. The above mentioned lack of center in the composition, that is, the diffusion of the field of view, stands out as crucial particularity of the decorative aspects in the Petković’s abstraction having its source in the “Matisse’s system”.26F Moreover, the created situation is an all over diffraction of the painting in manifold details with a point of stress in the planar effect, in the poster qualities of the gesture, in the absence of volumes, spatial profundity and perspective … These details – cut-outs are strengthening the “modulation created by the interrelation of proportions between the surfaces”. The ornament as a metaphor of infinity is neutral, disinterested, de-ideologized, it is analogous to the music or abstract art wherefore very close to the beauty. Petković is embracing the ornament during the times when the modern age ban on its usage was lifted and re-evaluated by the post-modernism. Yet there is a peculiarity with this artist regarding his treatment of the ornament. That which is basically decorative, devoid of mythology, drama, tragedy27F or of affects in general – less with Matisse28F than with Petković – is not absolutely neutral and released from emotions, especially in comparison to his monochrome paintings from the 1970s. The closest relation between the two colleagues is established by their even-handed views on the significance of drawing (arche-drawing according to Y. A. Bois) and color. As an aside, Matisse was among the first to offer a solution to the long standing battle of these two artistic phenomena for a higher rung on the ladder of values.29F The beauty for Matisse may also be perceived in the dance. Several of his canvases (Le Bonheur de Vivre 1907, La Dance 1909, La Musique 1910) were inspired by the dancers from the Moulin de la Galette on Pigale, from the folk dances he encountered during his stay in Callioure, from the oriental dances or perhaps, according to Alfred Barr, from the painted Greek vases. With Petković on the other hand, those simple figures dancing over a neutral surface are reduced to a play of drawing gestures. Modeled with scissors, his cut-outs are considerably emphasizing the effect of the movement within the extended space, thus establishing a curious dynamics which is due to the vast proportion taken by the white wall surface. The delicate pieces of unpainted canvas as seen with Matisse, are now with Petković assuming their primary function as a support of the composition and at the same time the unction of the “silence in music, ellipsis in the poetry or stillness in the play”. However, the very methodology of execution as well as the interrelations of playful events represented by the drawing gestures over the huge wall panel, are all suggestive of the puerile purity – one that may be seen in his architectonic constructions of little houses from the series Uninterruptedness 1-5 (1977-1982) and Variations on a given topic 1-2 (1982). The relevant anthropological signifier of this human activity, in case when it is taking place on the field of arts – “the artistic play” – is something that is surpassing all forms of play in nature … “a play providing durability”.30F #13 Considering that playing is a disinterested activity, as are the music and the abstract art, we may immediately recognize its logical connection with the beauty. Play is there for the sake of playing the way the beauty is for the beauty’s sake. There is no associative, political, symbolic or mythological connotation. Simply, it is a “phenomenon of the excess”.
The music, too, may be a “phenomenon of the excess”, something which is “genetically” connected to the dance, to the beauty and enjoyment. It performs an important function in the oeuvre of Matisse, but it also constitutes a fundamental element in the life and the creative process of Petković. It is no a pure coincidence that Matisse – who watched the dancers in the night clubs of Paris and folk dances at village celebrations – was overwhelmed by the jazz music during his stay in America and that on this theme he had illustrated a book of cut-outs. Even less coincidental is that Petković is considering music as an elementary life substance. He is constantly painting accompanied by the music, that is, in practical terms he is translating its colors, nuances and rhythms on the canvas, cardboard or in the pigments of the installation art piece Simbio (1995). The blood stream of his work is inconceivable without the ever present complement of the music. The two arts for him exist within an earnest cohesive relationship. All the phenomenological aspects of the one are having their counterpart and lexical equivalent in the other. “The formative years of my generation coincide with the arrival of the Beatles. Those were the times when music was connected to life in a different, more fundamental way. Maybe those were the times of illusions but, nevertheless, they left their imprint so that ever since persists this love of music … Presently I mostly listen to the experimental avant-garde music. At times it inspires me with its rhythm, at other times it enables me to devise a more concentrated approach to the work at hand … Music and painting are complementing each other. This complementing goes in both senses – indirectly, through the inner structure, as well as directly, in those so called integral works. In this music that we are now listening to (Steve Reich – v.v.) there is a structure which is also extant in a painting: contrasts, dark and light, combination of elements connected in a logical stream, possibility of unlimited duration which is delivered in a single time-frame”.31F Yet, at this point one needs to stress the distinction in the different approach towards the jazz music, proper to each of the artists. While Petković is embracing that which is timeless, disinterested and phenomenological in the music, Matisse for the illustrations of his book Jazz, resorted to concrete mythological themes, popular stories etc.32F After all, to both of them the music means “to be able to sing freely” as Matisse would say.
#14 Matisse was labeled feminine painter: a gentle rendition of the women, of the floral decorative elements, of the rounded uninterrupted line or contour, of transparent airy atmosphere. In accordance with some of the above mentioned statements as well as in accordance with his delicacy, pedantry and strive for perfection33F Petković too could be labeled the same, of course not in some derogatory sense but as a semantic determinant of his delicate link with the painting which is especially convincingly demonstrated in the series According to Monet.
#b
21. Ibidem
22. A. Izerghina In: Henri Matisse, Aurora Art Publisher’s, Leningrad, 1986, p. 17; “His art it seems to have smiled all through the Nazi occupation”. In: Robert Rosenblum, Op. cit. No. 18 (Art in America, No. 5, 1993, p.75);
23. Robert Kushner, In: Matisse: A Symposium, In; Art in America, No. 5, 1993, p. 82;
24. Cf. Op. cit. No. 20, p. 96 (Donald Kuspit, Armchair Agonist …); When he fell ill at the age of 20, his mother presented him with a box of water-colors to alleviate his healing. Since that moment he follows the pleasure principle – the painting as a priority in life, instead of reality principle – the pressure from his father to become lawyer. All representation of women on his canvases are homage to his mother and are having no erotical connotation, according to Kuspit;
25. The divorce, the period of social transition, the insignificant interest of his milieu in art produced around his eudemonistic approach;
26. About 1908 Matisse became the grand master of the “decorative”, something which is established in his statement that expression and decoration to him are one and same and that it is “a grave mistake to speak of the decorative in pejorative terms … The things need to be decorative because I am not painting things but the differences among the things”. In: Ad Reinhardt, Timeless in Asia, Art News, No. 9, 1960, p. 34. This line of reasoning is also finding a support with Gombrich, Gianni Vatimo. Oleg Grabar thinks that “the work of art may exist without the ornament but that it can not exist as a work of beauty and to be communicative in a fundamental way”. For Heidegger the ornament is “a central phenomenon of the aesthetics in the final analysis of the ontological thinking”, In: from Đani Vatimo, Kraj Moderne, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1991, p. 91
27. Cf. Massimo Carboni, Infinite Ornament, In: Art Forum, New York, September 1991, pp. 106-111;
28. The affinity of Matisse for the ornament derives indirectly from the linear calligraphy of Van Gough, while its direct source is his admiration for the Islamic and, in general, oriental culture;
29. Op. cit. No. 16, p. 21, (Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model …), “Matisse discovered the fundamental inseparability between drawing and color”;
30. Cf. Op. cit. No. 3, p. 13 (Ханс Георг Гадамер …);
31. Драган Петковиќ. In: В(алентина) Вeлевска, Ова е период на истражување, Млад Борец, Скопје, бр. 1480, 10.4.1985, p. 11;
32. Cf. www.gregkucera.com/matisse.htm;
33. Matisse has said that “I myself redo the composition every time. I never get tired. I always rely on the preceding state to help me begin again”. Lydia Directorskaya writes how Matisse used to take photographs from all stages of the painting because every morning he would find imperfections remained from the preceding day that he would subsequently repaint. “ … even if it meant many extra days of struggle before finding a new solution that would satisfy him … Matisse always erased at least compartments of undesirable color”. Lydia Directorskaya In: Henri Matisse, Peintures de 1935-1939, Paris, Galerie Maeght, 1986, p. 23; When I visited Petković on several occasions in his studio, I could not help noticing that there are missing paintings that I have seen previously. He explained to me that he was dissatisfied and thus had to repaint the canvases. In order to achieve the conceived beauty in a fervid tide of self-criticism he would constantly find his works flawed and constantly in need to be reworked.