Dado Đurić, although he was still alive and well at the time, became a kind of undisputed painting saint for the generation of young painters I used to hang out with in Berane in the summers of the 1980s. I guess his French-New York fame was also increased by the lack of real information, because he most often exhibited far from Yugoslavia.
I would recognize a reflection of Dado's nightmarish world in "The Crucified Lucifer", a canvas given to me by the then most gifted Ivangrad painter, Remzija Ramusović Reka. This canvas was taken from our apartment by the Devil at the beginning of the war in Bosnia. It seems that painting, like poetry, has the involuntary power to cast a spell on life.
I recognized the same Dado reflex in a drawing by Goran Poleksić, which I accidentally saved while moving between countries and cities. Although neither of these two friends from my youth, for various reasons, paints anymore, it's a shame that Goran and Reki are not here with me, to visit the exhibition at the SANU gallery together.
I enter the gallery and am immediately confronted with an abundance of sensations on canvas. They are arranged chronologically from 1953. Dado was 19 years old and after the Art School in Herceg Novi he came to the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He was lucky enough to be in the class of Marko Čelebonović, a painter who had studied in Switzerland, England and France and then worked with French painters of that generation in Saint-Tropez.
MARKO AND THE SOW
Čelebonović grew up in the famous building of Jakov Čelebonović, which is today the Museum of Applied Arts. Miodrag Dado Đurić was already dreaming big dreams in the early fifties. Much later, Serbian writer Bora Ćosić would describe his first encounter with Dado Đurić in Dorćol: “In the very cold winter of 1953, I climbed under the roof of a house on Strahinjića Bana Street; there, in a room with unglazed windows, lived Dado Đurić, a lumpenproleter, a dwarf-philosopher, a ‘man of iron’, to whom elemental forces can do nothing, and finally, one of the best painters I know”.
That Dado who slept on a wire bed covered with a coat and kept rodent skulls on the table, painted the same year the work I stand before seventy-two years later. The oil on panel is called "Marko Čelebonović and the Owl".
The first paintings of the young Đurić already hinted at a great painter. His mentor Marko Čelebonović helped him move to Paris in 1956. Later, Dado Đurić would say that he could have left the country earlier, but he felt that he was prevented: "I showed my drawings for the first time in Belgrade sometime in 52, 53. Henry Moore had an exhibition in Belgrade and visited the Academy of Fine Arts, and I showed him my drawings. He liked them a lot. He wanted to give me a scholarship. But, since I was not a member of the party, they expelled me. I have no concrete evidence for that. They said 'he's just an ordinary thug' and so on."
A THUG IN PARIS
The common rascal soon found his way in Paris. He had to work occasionally on construction sites, then as a lithographer. In his first years in France, he was influenced by pointillism. Then he turned to the kind of figuration and color that would make him famous and force critics to rank his name with Chagall and Dali. Since his first exhibition in Paris in 1958, at the Daniel Cordier gallery, he had become in demand. The great international surrealist exhibition a year later, to which he was also invited as an exhibitor, actually established his fame.
Dado Đurić would once say of himself that he was an "anti-colorist". He was also able to explain this: "When there are many colors, the painting becomes heavy and as if it wants to fall. The painting should float, it should live. Colors are both salvation and ruin. That's the problem. For me, it's best when I have very few colors, so that it's clear. I don't like warm, hot colors".
The French poet Georges Lambour wrote, after observing Dada's paintings, that everything in them seemed to be breaking, everything was permeated with fine cracks and seemed as if it would fall apart at any moment.
THE WORLD HAS ALREADY FALLEN AWAY
The large-format diptychs are full of monstrous figures, beetles with pincers, ruins in a cold, blue light. It seemed to me that the French poet was wrong. These paintings do not seem as if they will fall apart at any moment. They are painted – as if everything has already fallen apart. Their dystopian character is obvious. But there is also the anatomical precision of his maternal grandfather, the physician Jovan Kujačić. There is also the passionate study of the History of Nature, by the famous 18th-century French naturalist, Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon.
I think about everything that inspired Dada. Or rather, about what caused him pain and what brought him joy. The premature death of his mother, being misunderstood, Belgrade's bohemian madness, the legendary Medial group, French beginnings in poverty. But that's not all. I'm standing in front of the painting "Diptych from Montjavul". A small town in the north of France could erect a monument to this painter, because with this painting's title, that town is inscribed on the eternal map of the world. This diptych is owned by the Guggenheim in New York.
Post-apocalyptic mise-en-scènes evoke associations in me that bring them close to the aesthetics of "black punk" or the visual solutions in The Lord of the Rings. Then, from somewhere, the thought pops up in my mind that Dado mentioned somewhere in a conversation that his mother, a biology professor, told him before her death - you will be the Walt Disney of your generation. Mothers like to compare the incomparable. Only when Disney came out of the atomic shelter after the end of the world - would he see the world through Dado's eyes.
OWN HOLE
His dedication to painting was obsessive. Once, in an interview, when asked where painting led him, Dado Đurić replied: "It leads nowhere, except to your own hole. It is a terrifying one-way street. It has the taste of physical pain that eats us away."
In a series of untitled paintings, the painting "Atelier" seems to confirm that painting was a painful process for the artist.
In his canvases, Bora Ćosić recognized a “nightmare-civilization” in which “the pre-life world of the 20th century is disintegrating into its own parts in a contagious way.” After visiting the artist’s estate in Normandy – where the painter had bought an old windmill and a garden – Bora Ćosić called his imagination “the memory of a returnee from hell.”
His American years are well known – he brings his life partner from New York, the Cuban Carmen Lydia, with whom he will remain for the rest of his life. The couple will raise five children in Normandy, France. Alain Bosque writes a book about him: “Dado, the universe without rest”. The prices of his paintings are rising. But fame does not change him. He is a perfectionist to the point that it drives gallery owners crazy. Daniel Cordier witnesses the artist destroying a series of his own canvases that famous galleries would have fought over. Artistic dissatisfaction is a constant companion of the creative process.
WAR ON THE BEACH
His painting "The Beach" could be called a finger in the eye of the first waves of mass tourism. Because the artist's beach is also part of the nightmare.
In an interview with Branka Bogavac in 1979, he said: "If I were satisfied, I would be walking around Paris. I am very involved in painting. For me, my painting, if you'll excuse me, is more important than my life."
Daniel Cordier, a man who witnessed Dada's creation for decades, wrote in his text "In the Center of Bleeding Humanity" that this painter's world has been transformed into a "monstrous hospital in which beings writhe in pain and shame." The Frenchman believes that Dado unapologetically drags us into this shame: "His paintings are so shocking (in the strongest sense, unforgettable, so to speak) that, long after viewing them, we will experience them in our hearts as remorse."
His art is imbued with surrealism, yet I hesitate to call him a surrealist. I don't know if this world is intentionally irritating, or if it is simply an expression of his inner being. I see that from decade to decade he has shifted the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, the corporeal and the landscape. His creatures have something human, but also something of rodents and birds, of monkeys and reptiles.
Only when I stand in front of the canvas “Civil War” do I see that Dado’s vision from 1967 has come dangerously close to our reality. Or is it that in the invisible essence of human reality there is “the nostalgia of Time that devalues beings and things”, as Kordije wrote about these canvases. Here “the overthrown man joins the animal roots”. The dance of death that Dado offers us is an endless circle of beings, materials, plants, buildings in interpenetrating decay.
I remember that Dado Đurić once called himself “Gogol’s bastard”, thus expressing his admiration for the great writer. One could say that the painter’s world is as full of “dead souls” as Gogol’s. But my inner associative chain here led me to entire passages from Miodrag Bulatović’s prose. His painting with words was close to these canvases in terms of its eruptiveness and bizarreness.
Although painting was “more important than life” to him, Dado did not remain faithful to it. In the 1990s, he bought a neglected vineyard in the south of France and painted walls and made sculptures on the property. And in the north of France, in Gisor, he decorated the roof structure of the chapel there. Graffiti and digital experiments also interested him. His last major work was the artistic decoration of an old stone house in the town of Fécan on the Normandy coast.
The exhibition disturbed me. And in a strange way, it calmed me. What is disturbing is that the unbearable images of the aestheticized nightmare of the last century have actually become somehow harmless compared to the visual content that the media and social networks bombard us with every day. What is reassuring is that through this kind of art it is possible to sense the grotesque layers in our souls. Confronted with Dada, we are actually confronting our own human bizarreness. Looking at these canvases, everyone is actually peering into their own black hole.
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