Exhibition activities in 2018 academic artist and professor at several academies in the area Ervin Ćatović (52) started in Montenegro.
In Podgorica's Modern Gallery in January, he had the exhibition "Life as a Game", a retrospective of works from the last ten years, last week in Bar on the Winter Scene of the Bar Annals in King Nikola's Castle, an exhibition with about twenty works, and in the Bjelopolje Cultural Center his painting was the subject "Conversations".
In all three presentations, Ćatović introduced the art audience to his landscapes on the border of the abstract. After the bar exhibition, his 50th solo exhibition and the third in this city, the artist pointed out to "Vijesti" that his canvases did not immortalize areas that have geographic coordinates.
"I don't build them based on reality, I don't look at them through the window, but I create an image that I carry inside me. These are my imaginary expanses. My landscape is my personal nature, it is not classical, but turns into an associative landscape without figuration that is found in a gesture, in a stroke, without objectivity, almost flirting with abstraction", says Čatović.
Born in Pristina, where he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and postgraduate studies, Ćatović studied in Italy and France. He is a full professor at the Faculty of Arts in Zvečan, University of Priština, with a temporary seat in Kosovska Mitrovica, a full professor at the Department of Art at the State University in Novi Pazar, and since 1999 he has been teaching at the Faculty of Teachers at the University of Belgrade.
He is a member of ULUS, ULUCG and SULU, a participant in 19 prestigious art colonies, and so far he has received the first prize of the Youth Biennale in Novi Pazar in 2000, the first prize for the conceptual design of the plaque of the "Golden Flake" festival in Rožaj in 2003, the "Longin" prize for outstanding creative contribution from the field of art of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pristina in 2011, "Prishtina for creativity and contribution to culture" (PKC) award, 1999, SANA thanks for the artwork that enriches the SANA collection...
The primary message from Ćatović's paintings is sent by color, and red is dominant in recent works. The artist explains to "Vijesta" that in his art story she deserved such a place because "color is a reflection of my character".
"Red is the color of passion, and I am very temperamental by nature, and I try to handle red very carefully artistically, because it can also be a very poisonous color, it can also flirt with kitsch, and therefore it should not be approached without attention in fragments. I am trying to use the inner temperament of Valerian in red in the painting, which is also very present throughout history in other painters, in literature, and in other arts," said Ćatović.
The exhibition in the Castle that is on display
until March 15, were marked by large-format canvases. When asked by "Vijesti" how much freedom he gives him to express the idea he wants to present to the world, the artist replied that the work cannot be determined according to the format, and that he himself does not actually create the image according to the format.
"I work in smaller, medium gallery and large format, and the one I presented in the Castle, I think that sometimes it gives a special ambience to a painting, it places it in a space, it gives it strength and a special place, especially if you are a painter of gestures like myself, in a way it is transposed in a large format and has its own meaning. I imagined this concept to be woven from a large format and to be from the same paradigmatic corpus, but, in any case, the artist should respect each format", stated Ćatović.
In this phase of his work, acrylic technique is very common on his canvases. Ćatović says that recently, with acrylics, azure sequences "which are present only in gouache, tempera and watercolor" have been achieved.
"I also successfully obtain a structure and combine it with a gesture, I come up with some solutions, therefore, I single it out as a technique that corresponds to my expression", concluded Ćatović.
The artist's works radiate a new reality and a special identity
Opening the Bar exhibition, art historian Dr. Anastazija Miranović called these paintings Ćatović's "mental landscapes", and stated that the painter's work of art signifies and radiates "a new reality and a completely unique identity".
"Ervin's artistic cycles derive from each other, they follow each other in the writing of the old-new pages of a kind of pictorial saga, with the internal language of self-shaping. It is not the disassembly and reassembly of the eternally deceptive nature, but the awareness that "to know" etymologically refers to "having seen", to the experience of sight, which is immersed in the matter of the world", added Miranović.
Bonus video:
