The Layers of the Macedonian Soil in the Paintings of Gligor Chemerski

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The Layers of the Macedonian Soil in the Paintings of Gligor Chemerski

#5 Infusing new energy and vitality into the great Byzantine themes, Čemerski’s paintings reinvigorate them with extraordinary force.
Inspired by his experience of Western European painting in his earliest days, and that too by the work of those masters in whose paintings one can see matter being torn by inner dynamics in which spirituality over and again expresses its striving to soar towards ecstasy and exaltation (El Greco, Tintoretto, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Picasso…), Čemerski steps into Byzantium – in fact, rather into to the Macedonian variant of Byzantine painting – bent on introducing new commotion and a new élan vital #6 into its stiff painting dogmas. Interpreting the thematic unity of the frescoes of St. Sophia in Ohrid, Kurbinovo and Nerezi, according to his own understanding and with his own handwriting, he lends them his bolting gesture, his feverish restlessness and his inclination towards a beauty that does not fear fervidness. In his painting we witness the use of a distinctive inter-textuality, an intercultural and inter-temporal exchange of sensibilities, wherein this painter, in a fascinating way, manages to bring into relation seemingly distant worlds and reconcile opposites. Yet, we do not speak only of themes that the virtuoso art of Čemerski’s brush interprets anew, but of an extremely bold essay to delve into the true nature of our land’s mediaeval frescos: we speak about burrowing into the core of the painting process and its highest creative moments, of an essay to rejuvenate and relate it to the current language of painting. In fact, it is obvious that Čemerski is a painter with great ambition whose work shows that it does not lack a contemplative basis and that the painter does not lack ability to realise it, to incorporate the Byzantine painting sensibility in the palette of traditions from which modern art movements of the world draw their driving potential. To the method of the mediaeval fresco painters, most of whom are anonymous, Čemerski adds the spontaneous gesture, the free movement of the line, the dynamics of renewed expressionism, showing that already in the work of those great old masters it did exist in a hushed and silent form, like a seed waiting for its time to shoot. Čemerski’s most recent phases represent a modernised Byzantium, seen through the eyes of a contemporary of ours. His liberal returns to the “Lamentation” at Nerezi or the numerous – glorious! – variants of St. George’s fight with the dragon, are works that the inspired artists of the past would have painted in the self-same way had they lived in our time.
#7 Certainly our Mediaeval frescoes are not the sole stimuli that intersect in this painting. There we oftentimes feel echoes of works created in other parts and other times: images from Coptic tapestries, from pre-Columbian America, of the calligraphy of the Far East – all of them can be discerned, at times, as a stimulus that has steered Čemerski’s imagination and hand into an adventure, the goal of which is to bridge the seemingly insurmountable chasms of divided space and time, which – as the work of this painter demonstrates – are not insurmountable to the spirit.

2018-08-21T17:23:36+00:00 October 1st, 2002|Categories: Reviews, Gallery, Blesok no. 28|0 Comments