"...I bring clear water from the spring, thinking that the grasses, reflections and touches and communication, the shadow and the geometry of contact with it, clear water, crossed the threshold and made me ready for work..." (Dragan Karadžić)
In the title "SIGNS...TOUCH...DURABILITY", the last of the retrospective exhibitions of the artist, academician Dragan Karadžić, the essence of his art is sublimated, reduced through the simultaneity of three phenomena to primordiality and eternity and that in between - life. That between what happens permanently, continuously and happens in layers, we individually become aware of in childhood, where the seed germinates, where it grows and swells, sways, moves and breaks, like grass in the wind... The artist would say: "They coincided source and (creative) source..."
It seems that, a retrospective look at four and a half decades of artistic creation, regardless of the medium of telling, speaks of one thing, the only important and valuable thing, about what all true art essentially deals with - about life, nature and man, their visible and invisible, extroverted and introverted correlations. Dragan Karadžić, precisely, is interested in these subtle touches of nature and man, but also the individual nature of man, which is reflected in relation to the one in which he lives and dies. Like a dedicated archaeologist, Karadžić's research and creative campaigns last for several decades, have their own phases/cycles, "preventive" and "systematic" probing of the soil, penetration, encroachment into ever deeper natural and civilizational layers, simultaneously also into the inner layering of the human soul. Such art resembles the letter that the soul uses in its communications, its ductus deciphers the inner spheres of life with the subconscious language of self-formation. The artist reduces the complexity of these internal relationships to metaphorical aesthetics, associative visual symbolism, pointing out like Reed that "it is easier like Columbus to discover another, new world, than to go deeper into only one part of this one that we seem to know so well... and, yet history piles up like garbage in front of nature's door. And we only need a moment of vanity and healthy senses to teach us that behind the usual is nature, in which for now we have some sort of right of precedence..."
The artist's attention is occupied by the mystical inner structure that determines every natural structure. He is not interested in the appearance of what we are looking at, but the insight of the inner view/perception that only art can express. If "...there is nothing in nature that does not exist in us" (Gabo), "all means of expression lead to the same goal - finding a human sign that is also nature" (Alešinski). On this common ground of intuitive understanding, Dragan Karadžić builds his artistic saga of reduced, hidden narrative, miraculous wholes and peculiar connections, where "one thing reminds of everything, becomes a sign of many". Systematically, analytically, successively, the layers of memories, interventions in the body of the painting, such as Abel's "waking dream" and the "myth of proximity", are added/replaced, moving through one's own past, with a reflexogenic, ontological act in attempts to reject death and everything transient. Karadžić aesthetically overcomes the immutability of the past by removing the figure of death hidden in every fleeting moment of life. In his works (equally in drawings, watercolors, paintings, photography), everything is in a balanced rhythmic movement, some peculiar, sensuous pulsation, checkers/titrations of brightness and sound. Lyrical abstraction, new enformel, gestural painting are just some of the drawers and stylistic determinants in which Karadžić's art is placed. More significant than the determined classifications is the fine balance of the building elements of the painting - compositional, color and drawing, an extraordinary sense of the measure of their interrelationships - which is visible in the first, surface layer. However, if we go a little deeper into the reading of Dragan Karadžić's works, we discover the unsuspected worlds of a devoted erudite, a connoisseur of Eastern philosophy, mandalas, calligraphy, Byzantine fresco painting, but also of Western European literary, artistic and musical heritage. The guide to the "cultural landscapes" of the artist's "mental geography" is, precisely, his work, which condenses/sublimes civilizational and personal experiences, forgetfulness and memories, memory of soil and letters, creative, vitalistic energy. Every color, line, stain, point, form, void/whiteness, elemental geometry, carries a certain meaning, personal and universal at the same time. Condensation of meaning, active silence, illegible contents, borderline accumulations, everything said and unsaid are the artist's prayers and personal confessions - in the picture, in front of the picture, communication with the creator. Karadžić's painting is a "living organism" woven from the pigment particles of life, ready to receive a confession and transmit a message. It simultaneously frees and imprisons, seeks processuality and work from within. Nothing in/on it is accidental, it is not repetitive, although sometimes it seems that way. The titles of the works hint at the desired context, but in no way clarify or trivialize the narrative, which is at the same time illegible, personal and important. And quite often, it is not exclusively abstract and associative, but very objective and figurative, for those who know how to look for/see what is behind, the subtext. Signs are everywhere, in each of them there is man, in nature she herself is hidden in man. The transcription of Karadzic's letter is not simple, nor easy, its musicality can deceive/mislead and spark vitality. Banded friezes, notes, slopes - sonar echoes, meaningful syncopations, depths of detail hide the universe. These are all signs, touches of duration...
"...Condensation of nature, not only of language, but of signs in general, is a circular, recursive activity, it takes place in stages of improvement, it almost never succeeds the first time, it requires reshaping. The new, the innovation, arises like this or not at all, in any case, not as a new beginning... Newness, as originality, as originality, seems spent. What interests us arises from accumulation" (Holger van den Boom).
Dragan Karadžić's decades-long artwork occupies a special place in Montenegrin art history. Others can resemble, resemble, imitate, compare, follow. But, quite certainly, it is the original value and signification, the individual poetics of "a complex set of emotions, deepened loneliness, with questions broader than form and art. The need for desired worlds of play, memory, oblivion, some reverberation of signs, echoes, memories... Pictures created with a focus on reduction, apparent lightness, restraint, with the aim of deep personal involvement and confession..."
(The author is an art historian and art critic)
Bonus video:
