Artist for a century... One hundred years of sailing. And what a voyage! The most expensive man of all time. And a true peer - of surrealism. That's why a peculiar (beyond the logic of any manifesto) surrealist impulse was so natural for few people. It sounds almost incredible, Vojo Stanić was born in the same year that Breton published the first Manifesto of Surrealism, one of the most influential texts of the 20th century.
Maestro from Škver was born when Virginia Woolf was a 42-year-old lady... Hemingway i Borges in 1924, they each had twenty-five. The time when they were - young writers. When Vojo was born, Lenin was only dead for 13 days. AND Albert Camus was eleven years old...
No one knows how to deserve a hundred years, but Voj's way would perhaps speak of the purity of being and purity of view. I have never met a person who I was so sure had never thought an evil thought in his life. It must be a secret. And those eyes, which defy the years, forever the eyes of a child.
After Voj's death, all those wonderful characters in his paintings remain, passers-by who walk into your life and become an inalienable part of it. Opportunities destined for memory that surpasses other knowledge. It's all in what you see, no explanations are needed, every word is superfluous. And each of these characters will continue to carry a part of his wonder before the world, authentic, infantile and therefore inexhaustible...
Unlike the vast majority of modern art, which seemed to have the goal of unraveling the world, to the end and at any cost, here we have a master who can make a new magic out of anything, find it where you would never expect it, and make it anew. enchants the world, "in the manner of the old magicians". That's part of Voj's magic of revealing the world - by letting the magic work, to manifest itself.
Scenes that have the ease of dreaming and believability that surpasses any so-called reality. Compared to Voj's scenes, every reality seems wasted and insufficient. As a student's sketch...
There are also all those gatherings where Vojo ennobled people, he was simply unsurpassed in that.
In February of this year, we published an issue of Art entirely dedicated to Voj Stanić and his hundredth birthday. Then I wrote the column "Centenarian", in which, among other things, I recalled a meeting in Belgrade from the eighties, with Mr. To Tasić, retired art teacher and father of my good friend. Mr. Tasić mentioned to me that he studied sculpture right after the war, and then he started talking about his class, about his colleagues from the student studio - Matija Vuković, Voj Stanić and Dear Đurović... His memories of Voj were full of pure admiration, human and artistic. "He told me that Vojo used to read aloud in the studio Vinaverov translation Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel... It was a spectacle, he says. "We would all eventually stop working and turn into his audience. I immediately found the book, but it wasn't even close to when you listen to Voj read and act..." Wasn't that stamp of Rabelais (along with the signature of Vinaver's translation genius) visible on Voj's work from the beginning?
Art has powers that we suspect and those that we do not know. Both have an effect on us.
I was always fascinated by Voj's childish eyes. His eyes, like the miraculous Wilde's DG, not old. That kind of liveliness can produce a miracle. I believe that such purity of vision is the reason for his exceptional art as well as his longevity...
Because if your view does not grow old, if "reasonableness does not devastate you", if you do not silence your wonders but give them whole gardens, if you never stop playing... Can old age come to such a person and if it does - can it what.
A mythical creature, like a unicorn. A centenarian with the eyes of a child."
Those eyes, even closed, transcend death and any form of oblivion...
Bonus video:
