On the occasion of the exhibition "Drawings" by Ilija Branko Burić: Transition to visual poetry

Several decades ago, I had the extraordinary honor of speaking about a particular definition of the world, a definition that was conceived with his own mind and interpreted with the master's hand. Ilija BurićIt was in a gallery that no longer exists because it was erased by the years that followed and the supposedly economic spirit that they brought.

And it was an impressive exhibition of portraits - an exhibition of portraits dominated, almost without exception, by cow heads, which you have no doubt noticed as one of the visual themes of this exhibition at the Petrović Castle. Why do I say it is so impressive? First of all, because Burić's method of portraiture relies on several striking, quite precise and, to say the least, interesting distortions and distortions.

Since the human head lost the significance it had in its better days, they say, the portrait (classical, academic and conventional portrait) has been left without its main character. I don't know if I'm saying that both the portrait and its main character have failed - but, in any case, Burić's artistic ingenuity consisted in the fact that he completely distorted the portrait and, in place of the human head, inserted a cow's head. And this replacement itself testifies to the fact that this is an artist who knows what he is doing and who knows what he is talking about - and, therefore, we should not see in it the artist's malice or limitations, but, above all, his intuition. But that's not all, and I have something else to say: the hero of Burić's portrait, who we can only call "a cow" for lack of a better term, himself suffered very significant damage in the process. Because in order to make her worthy of a portrait, Burić also distorted the cow. First, by excluding her from that pastoral situation in which weaker artists continue to see her and thereby taking away from her that naive and bland romanticism in which even she (namely, the cow) no longer believes, and then by giving her a human character - and I completely agree with you: he did not make her happy!

Burić, however, is by no means joking. A painter who, like him, took his first and basic steps towards the German expressionist group “Most” (The Bridge), such a painter doesn't make jokes.

Instead, he carries out his operations to the end, and that is precisely why each of his human-like cows, i.e. all these "minotaurs" (if you agree to call them that, following the example of the ancient Greeks), is psychologically fully equipped, approximately as humans are. However, when he attributed to them an undoubtedly human individuality, Burić made sure to classify these creatures in his own way - and this is another of his ingenuity: because, of course, he does not classify them into herds, he arranges them in a kind of series, and these are, again, endless series, which should make it clear that this is a process that can hardly be stopped. It is, therefore, an endless repetition, so we would simply think that it is an obsession (which is the case) and that it all turns into monotony, but that is not the case at all, because here (namely, in this obsession) is contained a completely exact (and probably very original) method that this painter discovered in order to use it to define the world, a world that, if I may say so, has exhausted its self-esteem to the critical extent that it raises its horns exactly in the place designated for a star.

So, okay, what happens next with this double portrait and its two-faced head?

What could be the evolution of the modern minotaur? In Burić's artistic perception, as we see, this double being and this two-faced head, apparently (that is to say, to our eyes) transforms into an almost completely abstract composition, in which, as far as I can see, a pure state remains sedimented, which we could call a state of precise nostalgia. And a kind of visual mathematics was, in fact, required, as a condition sine qua non (and Burić worked on it for years) in order to sediment a state of precise nostalgia from that double portrait and install an imaginary bridge in it (we mention the bridge for the second time, although it is not visible) through which a connection is established with an abstract atmosphere and a homeland of the same kind, and in which, as we see, figures and beings are merged with their, also, abstract, landscape - and through which (so, once again: bridge!) this artist, from the artistic definition we were talking about a moment ago, moved into visual poetry.

In other words, Burić, thanks to this, became a poet. As he did with the “metaphysical portrait of the mother” (as he calls it Ljiljana Karadzic) became a poet and Krsto Andrijašević, to add it to this text, and in doing so, he has shown that he had more artistic luck than, for example, Filip Latinović, who, while working on a portrait of his mother, increasingly discovers that he is painting a parrot.