The monumental saga of Platia

On the occasion of Montenegrin Independence Day and seven decades of successful creative work, the Cultural Center of Danilovgrad, in May of this year, organized a representative exhibition of paintings by prominent Montenegrin painter Nikola Mijo Vujošević (Podgorica, 1929) in the House on Rsojevica. Vujošević graduated from real high school (1948) in Podgorica. He started painting (1945) in the Studio of the Ministry of Education of Montenegro in Cetinje, and finished his painting studies (1953) in Belgrade. So far, he has had twenty-five independent exhibitions, and exhibited at over two hundred collective exhibitions. He is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including: Titograd Liberation Award (1964); First prize, 4th Winter Art Salon, Herceg Novi (1971); Thirteenth of July Award of the Assembly of Montenegro (1973); "13 November" Salon Award, Cetinje (1990); "Diatreta" award, Pljevlja (2007).

Vujošević has been engaged in pedagogical work, art criticism and journalism for a long time, he has published several books: "Sa likovnih obzorja" (1988), "Kruninanje kamena" (1999), "Memento" (2005), "The Magic of the Canyon" (2014). He was a member of the presidency of SULUJ, president of ULUCG, the Association of Fine Arts Pedagogues of Montenegro, a member of the Fine Arts Board of CANU. He has the status of a prominent creator of Montenegro (since 2010), lives permanently in Podgorica and creates in a studio in Bioč. The recent explanation is accompanied by a color catalog with excerpts from the texts of numerous personalities who wrote about Vujošević's work.

In the exhibition hall of the House of Culture, Vujošević's mini-retrospective exhibition was presented to the public, which includes forty representative works, mostly oil paintings on canvas and hardboard, gallery and small format, as well as a dozen pastels. The exhibition begins with several very early paintings by Vujošević: "Summer in Bjelopavlići" (1950), "Spuška glavica" and "Self-Portrait" (1953), and "Flowers" (1954), and continues with numerous works from the Morač canyon, with deep gorges , vertical cuts, tunnels, sparkling rapids and luxurious lichens. It was those first works from the fifties that permanently directed Vujošević towards the Montenegrin ambient values, towards the exciting landscape, actually towards the contrasting and dramatic Platija canyon.

Certainly, those vivid and very picturesque landscape values ​​were and forever remained Vujošević's inexhaustible paradigmatic source, which for over seven decades beneficially inspires his mental and creative potential. In that wide, creative-artistic range, artistically sublimated scenes of deep angles and extended views appear, in which a strip of bright blue sky flashes near the top, and turquoise rapids of sparkling waters flicker deep in the lower zone. In continuity, there are also numerous ambient sequences with extremely close distances, flat and two-dimensional with emphasized rusticated structuralities. And as much as those three-dimensional-in-depth scenes can be connected in a certain way with the elements of the objectivist and the real, they are all flattened-flat, brought almost to the limits of the associative and semi-abstract.

When Vujošević's first works, which are paradigmatically inspired by Montenegrin's luxurious ambient values, are analyzed more carefully, it is possible to observe several creative specificities. All those very inspired landscapes of his are logically oriented as extremely calming horizontals. Then, it is noticeable that in the XNUMXs, Vujošević, painting with oil on prepared canvas, used relatively little colored pigment, with a lot of solvent medium. Precisely because of this, the explicates from that time seem very transparent, light and fluffy. On them, energetic strokes with wide brushes can be recognized, and the drawing matrix is ​​emphasized by dark matter. In these works, parts of unpainted canvas appear sporadically, which from the background, with their whiteness, provide additional light and resonant sonority to the surrounding color passages. Vujošević's canvases from that period are Valerian, very loose, but they are chromatically restrained, they are devoid of dense layers and texturality, in fact their tactility is subtle and primarily in the sphere of the senses.

However, when over time, Vujošević's sensitive-inspirational focus was directed towards the Morača canyon, i.e. towards the petrified and harsh Platija, he began to orient his canvases vertically, while at the same time significantly raising the drama of the scene. Successively, with the paradigmatic change, Vujošević's innovative technical-technological procedure also starts consistently. The drawing matrix is ​​relegated to the background, the chromatics become more explicit and resonant, the colored areas face each other more tightly, the Valerian relationships become more drastic. Vujošević establishes coherent relationships between warm and cold shades, and his palette is experiencing a real renaissance. The psychological charge changes drastically, the previously poetic and lyrical rapidly tends towards the dramatic and grotesque, and Vujošević certainly finds his artistic modus vivendi.

The compositional structure of all Vujošević's works of art has been masterfully researched, expertly balanced and balanced. Although the drawing matrix is ​​not in the foreground, from the direct confrontation of the contact surfaces, it can be seen that each of his works is founded on a stable drawing template, that is, on a drawn linear schematic. During the immediate creative-artistic execution, Vujošević expertly underpaints the treated plane, applies paste-like layers, plays with rusticity. In the further process, it is used by pouring liquid colored matter, depositing, scraping the deposit, rubbing, printing, spraying, and then with a semi-dry and abundantly soaked brush. Furthermore, with gestural strokes, with an extraordinary sense of measure, he establishes compatible relationships between diverse shapes and forms, achieving a harmonious unity of opposites.

General, and especially directed, morning, noon and western light, are an important factor in all Vujošević's sumptuous compositions, be they gigantic or miniature ones. Intrusions of light beams, as in a scene, direct the viewer's attention to the key elements of the scene. And almost as a rule, behind the very darkened, cooled and dark gray Platian curtains, the sun's rays flash, bathe the vertical sides, shoots of warm heather, scattered lichens flicker, and life magically returns to those cold and alienated habitats. During a multi-decade, extremely fruitful creative odyssey, Vujošević continues to be extremely inspired, and continues to narrate the very specific and very special "Saga o Platija" in a visual manner, infusing it with unique, increasingly recent vitalist juices of longevity.