Exhibition of an academic painter Goran Ćetković entitled "Blind Travelers" was opened the night before last in the "Jovo Ivanović" Modern Gallery in Budva's Old Town.
Ivana Domazetović on behalf of the Museums and Galleries of Budva, she greeted the attendees and announced the director of the Institution, mr Lucija Đurašković, who opened the exhibition.
Đurašković pointed out that the central theme of Ćetković's entire painting oeuvre is, among other things, man.
"For more than two decades, this artist has been investigating man's destiny: his destiny with existence, his limits, downfalls, possibilities, hopes, expectations, declines and longings. As if stimulated by the mysterious power of the energy of Džanov's 'primal cry', which also implies a primary movement, where the liberated unmushy monk's cry emerges from the dark monotony of nothingness, Ćetković succeeds in forming figural outlines with his unusual, spontaneous art of expressive application of coloristic interweaving of pure and valerian nuanced bright colors human bodies, heads and faces, which indicates the artist's masterful ability to express emotional and thought content artistically with a pure pictorial process. "Constantly dealing with man and his key existential questions takes Ćetković into the world of secrets, suffering, emotional and psychological despair, emptiness and life's downfall, from which, through a cry, he strives to reach the extremes and possibilities that would liberate the primordial humanity imprinted from the beginning," Đurašković pointed out. .
The energy of Eros, the energy of the eternal enigma of the human being, she believes, is captured by the shadow of the opposite drive - Thanatos, while in that dualistic struggle one can sense the givenness of the moment, as a resistance to disappearing through the longing to step out of anxiety into something else.
"This conflict between the living and the inanimate is a reflection of the human being's conflict with himself and the world in which he exists, the conflict with the shackles in which we were born, and the universal question: does returning us to the past through disappearance, even if it is only an illusion, free from existential pressure manifested through time, i.e. transience. And the phenomenon of transience is mainly supported by the feeling of loneliness, separation, alienation, restlessness, suffering and pain, mental disorder and fear of death, through which the first bitter fruits of awakening and self-awareness of existence in the environment of a world ruled by constant evil with a tendency to total destruction are necessarily harvested , which tonight's artistic presentation confirms Ćetković's 'Blind Travelers', which in a certain artistic sense, in a certain way, build on the play and the latest performance Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', this year's premiere of the Grad Teatar festival, which is currently taking place, as well as the deep pain with which the whole of Montenegro has been shaken and enveloped in disbelief these days. Are these and the stars giving us a good warning and admonishing us to be careful through the path of life that we are rapidly walking? On the border of abstraction, that figural composition, those faces, without individual characteristics, gesturally defined in different perspectival abbreviations, at the same time tend towards both synthesis and destruction of their appearance", notes Đurašković, and points out that Ćetković's works "scream with deep violent tones".
"Suggesting with all strength and effort the struggle for release from the restraints and shackles with which they are imprisoned, and the transformation of man into another, new species, where the blind will see with the eyes of kindness through beauty, that is, love, to which the torn spiritual center of gravity tends to return. As he would succinctly say Sartre: "Life begins on the other side of despair". Seen as a whole, Goran Ćetković's painting is primarily concerned with the question of man, today's man, but also man since his creation, the dark side of his being and the evil in himself, because let's not forget, a long time ago Cain killed his brother Abel... Therefore, the survival of his spiritual beings in this world where human values fade and, lost in the search for meaning, slowly disappear", added Đurašković.
According to her, Ćetković's painting represents, on the one hand, a manifesto of self-estrangement as, at the same time, the anguish of human silhouettes and the cry of gloomy faces, faces that reflect the painful truth of the need for emptying and purification from accumulated dissatisfaction with the drudgery of everyday life.
After the opening of the exhibition, the young pianist Mihailo Kovriha he played a Ukrainian folk song.
Bonus video:
