"Morača flows through my bloodstream"

(Continuation from last issue)

Nikola Vujošević deliberately created a new myth about the canyon, a new aesthetic world, both through paintings and theoretical-aesthetic attitudes.

In his painting, creative process, transposition and imagination have a special place, especially in turning the naturally beautiful and sublime into artistically beautiful, through liking and a sense of satisfaction. Natural beauty, in the Kantian sense, is related to reason and the sublime to the mind. In Nikola Vujošević's paintings, they secretly agree.

Morača Canyon, as a part of nature, evokes the idea of ​​the sublime, as something that surpasses our senses. The canyon is beautiful in itself, while its sublimity relies on the representation of it, which causes a particular excitement in the painter, especially the size and enormity of the canyon, which can be imagined but surpasses the senses. However, Nikola Vujošević rarely succeeds in transposing the naturally beautiful and the sublime into his paintings, turning them into artistic beauty through some mysterious creative alchemy. It is a combination of excitement, which evokes the sublime, and calm contemplation, which carries an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful in nature. Imagination is a creative force that works miracles with the mind and reason, in which the creator's talent and genius are manifested.

Nikola Vujošević founded his own cult of canyons and stones, trying to delve into their magic again and again: both when he paints and when he thinks. His studio is like an observatory in the canyon or a temple where the painting of the canyon is done, with an easel as an altar, a place where the door of the millennium opens and penetrates into the depths of the centuries, where the "noise of time" can be felt in the silence followed, the eons that have flown by, the history of geology and geography.

He writes that history with drawings, colors, and pictures. The chronicle of the canyon was written in his studio. History before history, told in visual language - colors, lines, shapes. Megaliths and eternity are transformed into beauty, the sky into azure and the river into an emerald eye.

Although Platia are devoid of human presence, under the burden of eternity, the rhythm of life is felt. Eternal rhythm! Hymn over the abyss of time written in stone script.

His paintings are an ode to the canyon, the apotheosis of the stone in the stone book of beings and non-beings - the unraveling of a great secret to which "the keys are in the grave". The painter brings the stone to life, imprints its soul.

Nikola Vujošević proved himself both in his paintings and through his poetics as a painter and researcher, a painter and a poet, the creator of a luxurious gift and powerful imagination, refined sensibility, returning to the canyon and the stone again and again. He searches for the ideal of the image, through countless forms.

In his paintings there is a solemnity of selected colors and lines, through which the speech of nature emanates - sound transformed into color, a rhapsody of colors. It's like hearing the stone choir of Platia. The painter seems to constantly sign the same picture in thousands of variations, and each one is a new creative experiment, through which he solves complex artistic problems. The architecture of Nikola Vujošević's paintings is dominated by stone, from details to megaliths. His opus is a kind of symphony of stone, while the Platias are in themselves a cosmic symphony of stone, the music of silence from Ananka's spindle. Painter Nikola Vujošević extracts sound from color, and turns sound into color again. The ontology of creation in primeval time is hidden under the silent silence, the crust of the stone.

Stone has a special place in Montenegrin tradition and memory. There is a mysterious connection between the painter and the stone. The sculptor would be happy with the spark: "the blow finds a spark in the stone". But from the spiritual spark a picture is born. Nature is God's work, and the nature in the picture is the creator's.

One painting and one book by N. Vujošević are entitled "Crowning of Stone". Lichens are turned into medals and decorations. He uses colors and other means to arrange stone on stone, megalith on megalith, rock on rock, plateau on plateau, looking at the sky from a frog's perspective and the river from a bird's eye view. Each rock is dressed in an aesthetic form. In front of the slavoruk, the gate of the canyon, there is a view of the canyon, and behind it, in the studio, the creation of paintings on the large iconostasis of an accomplished artist takes place.

Its colors: ochre, ruy, azure, emerald green and others, have not only an unforced instrumentality, but also a smell - the smell of stone, lichen and water. Existence takes place sub specie aeternitatis, in the scale of eternity - from stone to stone! The door opens to the primeval, to a space without time.

For Nikola Vujošević, the spirit of creation, the soul of nature is in the stone. While painting, he seems to be worshiping for hours and hours in stone, on the altar of his soul. In Platia, the spirit of the cosmos is reflected, the testament of the primeval is written in them. The painter tames and bridges the ambitions of the canyon with colors, lines - verticals and horizontals. Metaphysical joy arises from the combination of art and myth, colors and sound. For Nikola Vujošević, painting is a creative passion and an imperative, a life necessity, life itself in a higher sense.

"Morača flows through my bloodstream," says the painter. His Platia are staring at the sky. He is inspired by their strangeness, unrepeatability. In them he sees and experiences the drama of nature and stone, following their mood and character, changes. It gives life to the inanimate, gives it a soul. Morača Canyon becomes his, as he says, "fateful obsession, enigma, provocation", with the remark that the more he enters it, the more he, paradoxically, moves away from the way he originally saw and experienced it.

He is shown unlimited possibilities of interpretation, so that the changed relationship "requires new technological artistic solutions". And he adds: "The texture of the painting approaches the texture of Morački stone". In this regard, the painter's pantheism is visible, on the one hand, and aestheticism, on the other.

His poetic and aesthetic views were influenced by art criticism and essay writing. The book Magic of the Canyon points to the interweaving of artistic work and creativity with his life span. By his own admission, his painting changed under the influence of new motives and incentives, new attitudes towards the subject, new experiences, time.

Although he followed the artistic life in Montenegro and trends in Yugoslav and European painting, he remained self-styled, as a painter of authentic oeuvre and poetics. In the world of art, he is known and recognized as a prisoner of a unique landscape, a painter and a rhapsode of a canyon through several cycles and numerous paintings, conquering it again and again by noticing something new, elusive, what is on the other side. His extensive creative oeuvre is a kind of aesthetic legacy and an example of commitment not only to the magic of the canyon but to the sublime act of creation, and his artistic thought is a reliable guide in understanding contemporary painting and true artistic creation in general, an incentive in the search for one's own artistic expression.

(This text was written in memory of the great painter and dear friend of Nikola Mijo Vujošević.)