Between control and eruptive freedom

(Review of the exhibition by Biljana Keković, Modern Gallery "Jovo Ivanović", Budva, May-June 2025)

What happens when a painting no longer imitates the world, but gradually transforms it into a new reality, quieter but deeper? When pigment no longer serves to constitute a view, but to open up a space of inner experience - invisible, but present? Then we have before us not just a work of art, but a visual thought matrix - a structure in which feeling is transformed into duration, and color into the light code of the unconscious.

Such is the artistic world of Biljana Keković - a world in which the boundaries between introspection and expression are blurred, where the image does not seek interpretation but inner resonance. In these works, form is not experienced as a final expression, but as a starting point for inner orientation, a kind of map of emotional geography that can only be read by listening to its rhythm.

This exhibition is not a cross-section of creativity, nor is it a narrative retrospective - it is a state of presence in the process, a moment in which visual consciousness is transformed into the fluid of the image. Keković does not paint scenes, she visualizes a spiritual flow, a dynamic inner process: the translation of inner impulses into visually articulated forms that hover between control and eruptive freedom.

Movement in her works is not just physical dynamics, but a category of thought, a philosophy of corporeality without a body, where every move is the result of a dialogue between the conscious and the intuitive. In the cycles Thoughts in motion i Vode, the images function as resonant fields - without a center, without a focus, without a narrative, but with a richness of presence that constantly oscillates between order and chaos.

Her abstraction is not a negation of the real, but its transformative equivalent. Just as a river does not retain the same flow, but forever carries the same essence, so Keković's paintings do not repeat forms, but energy. They do not depict, but become.

Biljana Keković's painting practice is based on a long-term exploration of synesthetic relationships between color and sound, form and inner experience, which is an extremely rare and precious orientation in contemporary Montenegrin art. Color in her works is neither a mere visual accent nor a harmonious addition to the composition - it is the core of the structure, its inner architecture.

Through the tonal correspondence of colors, the artist achieves an effect that goes beyond the decorative: the painting takes on an acoustic dimension, like a musical chord that cannot be pronounced but can be felt in the pit of the stomach. Each color is a note, each surface is the silence between tones.

Biljana Keković decides to declare silence as energy. Her painting is not a product of reaction, but a conscious decision to filter reality through the experience of sensibility - not as an escape, but as an inverse affirmation of existence. Abstraction in her expression is not the absence of meaning, but its purification.

Cycle Vode particularly strongly reflects this fluid ontology of the image. It is not a representation, but a manifestation of the nature of water in its metaphysical form - changeability, mirroring, the ability to absorb and reflect. The image in this cycle is not a medium, but an entity - a living substance in a state of change. The viewer is not invited to understand the image, but to enter it as into a flow.

The artist manages to avoid two dangers of contemporary abstract art: banal decorativeness and sterile conceptualization. Her painting breathes - it is layered, yet airy; complex, yet free from weight.

The deepest reach of her expression lies in what the painting does not show, but suggests. It is this tension between foreboding and revelation, a visual silence that becomes a space for reflection. Her art does not offer answers, but asks questions - but questions that remain long after we leave the gallery space.

There is that rare artistic discipline in Biljana Keković's works that we also find in literature. Kazuo Ishigura - the ability to not communicate essential truths directly, but to feel them in layers of silence, in what is not said. Just as Ishiguro builds narratives on the edges of memory, on the quiet tension between the repressed and the intuited, so the artist paints not what she sees, but what endures beneath the surface of what is seen. Her painting, like Ishiguro's prose, refuses to dominate meaning - it directs but does not lead, is present but does not insist. In this restraint lies the power: not to shape experience, but to liberate it.

How do we know that an image has touched something important in us?

By the silence that sets in. Not from outside, but from inside. The sound around us doesn't stop - but the need to say something stops. Biljana Keković's painting doesn't seek our eyes - but our absence. As if asking us to forget ourselves for a moment, so that we can return differently.

What remains when the gaze moves away?

Not a trace of the painting, but a trace of the artist - of her silence, of her courage not to simplify the feeling, not to close the form, not to subordinate the color to the meaning. What Keković leaves is not a message, but a space: an inner place for a thoughtful stay. Her art does not try to convince us, but to liberate us - not with authority, but with presence. And it is precisely in this measured boldness - in the choice not to dominate the image, but to divide - that lies the strength of her authenticity.

(The author is an art historian and theoretician)