Exhibition of paintings by artists Djordje Vujičić entitled "I had a dream that was not a dream" opened on Monday in Podgorica.
Held in the Podgorica Gallery "Art", the exhibition can be considered a complete success due to the large number of visitors, which showed that Vujičić is a master of his craft, and that in Montenegro there is still a combination of originality with aesthetic quality.
The realism of oil on canvas combined with strong dreamlike and surreal narrative visions along with strikingly bright and vivid colors give the paintings a unique touch. Questioning human morality is a common theme in art, but Vujičić approaches these themes entirely from a unique aesthetic point of view, which puts him in a special class of quality.
Curator Aleksandra Butorović, commenting on the title of the exhibition, which is a verse by the great English poet Lord Byron, explains that this almost archetypal thought represents the backbone of human experience.
"Such a thought, almost archetypal, expresses this premise as the backbone of the structure of human experience in its uniqueness and the core of man who, despite his efforts to oppose the apocalyptic age in which he lives ambiguously, still retains the need to chart his existence in the form of survival," she said.
Butorović explains that the first segment of the exhibition represents a realistic exploration depicted through portrait installations, while the second segment presents post-apocalyptic visions of man's search for elements of humanity.
“The first segment of Đorđije's research is reflected in exceptionally stylish and realistically presented portrait installations, sometimes with suppressed grief and subtle glances, and most often with piercing blue eyes, while the author sublimates the entire spectrum of existential mechanisms, from the absurdity of basic despair to the presence of blissful calm. Each clearly defined wrinkle in the form of an inscribed feature on the faces of these portraits finds its own specific form and necessarily emphasizes the aspect of material density in the process of shaping, thus reflecting each intriguing life path reflected in the sphere of composition. In the second, conceptually more extensive separate segment, Đorđije presents another motif narrative, which in principle contains the belief that, conditionally speaking, through a prophetic painterly gesture, the idea of man can be transposed in an imagined post-apocalyptic context, while simultaneously searching for those elements of humanity that are, through generational memory, his line of authentic heritage,” she explains.
Vujičić told "Vijesti" that Montenegro is still the country where realism is the closest direction, adding that portraits offer him insight into his inner life.
"I think that Montenegro, as a country of artists, cherishes this realistic image even more than abstraction. Abstraction is something we get used to, but realism is still the closest thing to us, because we believe the most, no matter how much the sense of sight is not so perfect and that a good part of some misinterpretations can be had based on that sense through which we receive perhaps more than 90 percent of impressions, but that inner life that portraits offer me, because I don't like to decide so easily on a certain image to do it. So there has to be something in that portrait, something primal, pure, for it to find a place on my canvas," he said.
Vujičić adds that he chose oil paints on canvas as the technique for these paintings because it offers great potential in terms of realistic depictions.
"As for the technique I work with, oil paint on canvas allows me the greatest degree of realism. Because with oil paint you can create skin that is both dry and wet, and all those nuances that you can't with some acrylic paints. That's why I always try to choose a technique with which I can achieve the greatest degree of realism, if that's important to me," he adds.
Vujičić says that with his paintings he wants to provoke numerous existential questions in the viewer about their future, as well as their moral position.
"Just for people to question whether they know everything well and whether they are the most important thing to themselves, whether there is a need to look at our past in the rearview mirror and whether the future will make us better people," says Vujičić.
Bonus video:
