You could say I caught the last train. Due to great public interest, the exhibition of naive painting "My Naive" at the Palace of Arts Madeleine was extended until April 15, 2025. The exhibition mainly features works by painters from Kovačica. In addition to naive artists from Serbia, the exhibition also features a smaller number of representatives of the Hlebine School – three generations of painters without academic education from the Croatian village of Hlebine significantly influenced the overall naive art in the former Yugoslavia and in the countries that emerged from it.
I took the opportunity to have a friend give me a ride in his car. I know from experience that the elite address of Bulevar kneza Aleksandra Karađorđevića 53 is not designed for public transport, and visitors who walk to Dedinje are suspicious of the array of cameras and eyes from guard houses that guard the local prosperity.
We came across Topčiderska zvezda, because down below, part of the Boulevard has been excavated. My friend, who has been living in Sarajevo for a long time, asked me what kind of magnificent church that was. It wasn't there when he was growing up in Vračar. I had a hard time convincing him that it wasn't a sacred building, but the megalomaniacal palace of a famous media tycoon. When he finally believed it, he said that the building was - cocaine white.
NAIVES AT THE POOL
After a few minutes we stopped in front of the Palace of Arts. The Zepter couple, unlike some of their neighbors, built with taste and proportion. Their Palace of Arts has the elegance that is necessary to protect a pearl of art like a shell.
You can only enter with an appointment. I did this by phone that morning, and they let us in through a striking gate. In the lobby, at the reception desk, a friendly hostess charges us a symbolic fee of 200 dinars. She leads us through the inner courtyard to the part of the complex with the swimming pool.
The palace has a total area of 7.000 square meters, located in a garden which, as stated on the Palace's website, is an art and museum space in itself.
This is the first time I've come to an exhibition held in this kind of setting. We get a free catalogue and brief instructions. Then we're left to ourselves and – the pictures. At the same time, there's only one other couple from North Macedonia in the room.
The paintings are lined up by world-famous painters: Zuzana Halupova, Martin Jonaš, Janoš Mesaroš, Eva Husarikova, Pavel Cicka, Ivan Rabuzin. All of them are from Kovačica except for the Sombor naive artist Sava Stojkov.
Eva Husarikova from Kovačica has been at the top of naive painting in the world for decades. This has allowed her to make a living from painting. She often paints religious motifs, but also magical winter nights. Or, as on the canvas I am standing in front of, the harvest.
Such scenes immediately take me back to my childhood. I remember that the most beautiful New Year's cards were once decorated with reproductions of famous naive painters. Their winter idylls are actually an important piece in the mosaic of the New Year's mood from half a century ago.
The exhibition announcement states: "Transforming their works into vivid images of idyllic rural life, the artists achieve a dimension of the universal and timeless through their unique artistic expression. Their paintings, often painted in oil and acrylic, are characterized by their colorful palette, flat perspective, and childlike naive posture of the figures."
Štefan Varga is only in his seventh decade, so he is one of the younger artists represented in this exhibition. The joy of living oozes from his colors. Cheerfulness and humor make him recognizable. The beautiful past is intertwined with imagined scenes. His peasant who indulged in heavy reflection among ripe fruits was immediately likable to me.
The catalogue reveals that in December last year, the naive painting from Kovačica was included on the World Heritage List. Serbia thus became the first European country to include the artistic heritage of a minority on this list.
SLOVAK NATIONAL GENIUS
Slovaks settled in these areas 220 years ago. They brought with them the colorful folk costumes and a penchant for visual expression. Naive painting in Kovačica and the surrounding area flourished in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs. It also spread to surrounding areas.
The catalogue states that self-taught painters instinctively recognize color as one of their creative forces: "In addition to a palette of colors inspired by nature, in variations from intense to pastel tones, the artists introduce shades of purple, pink, terracotta, and orange into their paintings, conveying the atmosphere of strong afternoon or morning light."
One of them is Pavel Hajko. He is world-famous for his roosters. I am standing in front of one of them. The artist himself does not allow for too broad an interpretation of this symbol. For him, the rooster is “the embodiment of the male cosmic principle.” The same principle that Đole Balašević sang about: “I have a terrible rooster…”
The painter's world draws me into its vortex. Hours spent reading Miodrag Bulatović's novel "The Red Cockerel Flies Towards the Sky" flash through my mind, and the red cockerel from the painting by Žagal Hello Paris, and who knows what else. Hayk's rooster is a relative of these literary and artistic birds.
Not all of the famous naive artists from the Slovak village of Kovačica are from the Romanian village of Uzdin, which is also in the same municipality. Marija Balan was born in 1923 and has been painting since 1961. Critics say that she dedicated her poetic painting to the life of the Romanian community. She paints folk costumes in bright colors, thematically dedicated to field work, forest cutting, weddings and other festivities.
One of her recognizable motifs is bouquets of flowers. She died in 2008. Her painting "Peasants and Their Dogs" captured my attention a little longer than most of her other paintings.
MAGICAL NAIVE
I had to return with some paintings before leaving. Jan Mesaroš gave his horses wings based on folk tales. Here, naive painting meets magical realism, one of the literary wonders of the time. Mesaroš was born into a Slovak family in Novi Bečej in 1943, and in 1970 he joined the painting group Selo. He became one of the most famous Yugoslav painters in the world. He had over 100 major solo exhibitions and around 1000 collective exhibitions in 125 countries on all continents. I am pleased to be able to hang out with his paintings here, by the water, in a peaceful villa in Dedinje.
Although I automatically associate naive painting with idealized or imagined rural motifs, there are naive painters who chose urban landscapes as the starting point for their art. Emerik Faješ is the most famous representative of this school. His paintings were generally not created based on observation of the urban landscape. Faješ would first see these areas on black and white postcards. Then, traveling in his imagination, he saw and painted his imaginary cities.
The exception is the painting "The National Theater in Belgrade", which the painter was certainly in front of. He transformed a scene that is almost familiar to everyone into something magical.
Although he was born in Osijek in 1904, his Hungarian-Serbian family moved to Novi Sad when he was still a child. A world classic of Serbian naive painting, he did not pursue art between the two world wars. He worked as a button maker, antique dealer, comb maker, shop assistant, and turner in various cities of royal Yugoslavia. During World War II, he lived in exile in Hungary. After the war, he returned to Novi Sad, where he died in 1969.
Zoran Zarić was born in Prizren and graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade. His works have been present in our naive art for several decades. Pure colors and shapes somewhat set him apart from the mainstream. His scarecrows have become recognizable as a motif – I stopped in front of one of them.
I remembered the crossed sticks impaled in the plain, dressed in rags with a hat on top. I was a little scared when I was a child. But this Zaric accordionist amuses me now and takes me all the way to Mexico – he looks like a runaway mariachi on the Day of the Dead.
I move on, having almost gone around the swimming pool. I come across the works of Vojkan Morar, born in 1966 in Pančevo.
In some ways, his paintings are different from anything I’ve seen at the exhibition. This painter from Pančevo, who worked as a miller until his retirement and then moved to the village of Jabuka, says he works with the so-called meticulous technique – all the details are tiny. Angels are his main motif. His oil paintings also feature unusual buildings that little people enter in columns.
He once told a local portal: "The message is, above all, that there is something angelic in each of us, like a connection to something divine or whatever one believes in. My intention is to awaken that something in man."
I am becoming aware of the limitations of words in relation to colors. In this review of the exhibition, I have managed to highlight only a quarter of the artists represented. And each one is worthy of attention.
Hanging out with these images awakened "that something" in me, that which I am trying to understand, name, and convey to other people by writing this text.
Bonus video:
