#1 It may seem to you that Rubens does not belong to this century, not in name only. For this is a century of, let say, the film “ The Balkan Powder Keg”, an artistically brilliant film, with scenes of the Balkan pandemonium that divulge all the evil that rules with us with such power, that follows the people from the Balkans, till it finally “gets us” once and for all.
#2 Rubens’s refined intellect closes off this and all other kind of existentialist horror: not because of his spiritual defeatism or blind flight from the ethical challenge of confronting evil … for if can not pierce the dragon of evil like a modern-day St. George, he should at least brand him. Rubens has very insightfully perceived that such noble endeavors transposed in any kind of artwork can today easily fall pray to public economic manipulation. This is why Rubens refuses to use declarative pathos and visual dramaturgy in order to “work on a hot” subject of our contemporary civilization or our Macedonian environment. Yet they lie within him, as a storm that he tames with unequivocal gentleness, with tranquility, spirituality, nobility which are the spiritual essence of all his work. His wanderings through an imagined Arcadia he created are not disassociated from reality, from the personal life experience of the artist. Rubens has woven his genuine family life, such as he and his close ones have created, into an idea of how human life might be led in these inhuman times. The sights where the family of the artist bonds with nature (most of all in Saraj, near Skopje) are an open door through which images or contours from “another” zone slips in: remnants from the stories Rubens heard from his grandmother, from a legend or fairytale; images that are linked to the Christian sensibility.
The vistas from the preferred Saraj environment (or yet another) unroll before us, some even without a breath of “human” life in them – except for the refined feeling of the artist that humanizes them, as other great predecessors of Rubens have done from the renaissance onwards. The Macedonian artist has created a poetics that feeds not so much on the artistic procedure that he has mastered professionally through his work, as from the #3obsession that other great figures in the past have aspired to reach – that presumed point where everything begins, the point of order in the universe and our individual and brief existence.
Rubens is among those artists that have succeeded in their work to surmount, for themselves and for us, the limit of human fortuity. To convince us (or “fool” us) with his gentle artistic “caress” on the canvas, the velvet layers of delicately selected and coordinated colors that vibrate with the movements of nature, that the search for artistic “beauty” is still and very much worth our while. This is the form of struggle that Rubens has chosen to rise over the hopelessness and the ugliness that hover over modern day humanity in more ways then one.
the art is inside
