Ars sacra

SLAVOLJUB RADIVOJEVIĆ, THE PAINTER WHO BRAVELY BUILDS HIS OWN MYTH ABOUT LIFE IN HAPPINESS
Origins of Great Melancholy
In the time of crisis and drop of all values, mainly aesthetic, when technicism and nihilism suppress art as well as feelings and sensuality, this painter started from the intimate, from love towards a child, woman, city and sea. Amidst social and aesthetic chaos, similar to Giorgio Morandi and some masters between two wars, he returned to little things, silence of the studio, his world, outside the sound and the fury of senile post-modern art, and tells his story with the language of fine arts

By: Dejan Djorić

Slavoljub Radivojević, painter (Šabac, 1957) in the first decade of the XXI century – with the specificity of his creative work, concentration on certain subjects, more often independent and group exhibitions, received awards, predesigned media performances and growing popularity – drew the attention of art critics, art historians, gallery owners and audience. As a painter, he kept something from his sports and adventurous youth which, let us think of Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi or Frida Kahlo, always has an influence on art. Painting requests courage, therefore in many époques it came first among other arts. The painter is always tempted. Warrior, lover, duelist, karate practitioner, singer in the church choir, icon painter, fresco painter, above all a caring parent, Radivojević transferred some experiences from his turbulent life into art and poetized it in the spirit of Horace’s and Leonardo’s idea Ut pictura poesis. Connected with his artistic interests to Belgrade, Zemun, Mačva, Italy and the Mediterranean, to classic painting, he found his peace of soul and stability in the solitude of his studio, with his little girl, piano player Petra, inspiration and model for many paintings.

RETURN TO SMALL THINGS

His best paintings are created in a Vermeer-like atmosphere. Contemporaries claim that romanticist Djura Jakšić painted with his mouth half open, as if he wanted to transfer his breath into the canvas. Such moments, valuable for the spirit and creativity, were best described by a medieval monk: ”Nowhere have I found peace for my soul except with a book in a lonely corner.” Like Frans Hals and some old masters, Andrew Wyatt among modern ones, Radivojević found peace and inspiration with his dearest ones. His painting radiates warmth and fine energy characteristic for relations in a civil family.
Radivojević’s daughter Petra is his muse. Some of his greatest and best paintings were created to her honor. The love of the father towards his child disappeared as a creative impulse from present art, suppressed after the Renaissance, when Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the most beautiful sight of love between a grandfather and grandson. In the past, art could not be imagined without children, putto, and angels. In the time of crisis and drop of all values, mainly aesthetic, when technicism and nihilism suppress art as well as feelings and sensuality, Radivojević, unlike most, started from the intimate, from love towards a child, woman, city and sea. Amidst social and aesthetic chaos, like Giorgio Morandi and some masters between two wars, he returned to little things, silence of the studio, he exists in his world, outside the sound and the fury of late post-modern art. He established a completely new myth about life in happiness, perhaps anachronous, but different from daily life and media. He has no tendencies whatsoever towards postmodern euphoric announcements of the end of narrative artistic forms and streams of art. Therefore it can be said that he uses the language of fine arts to narrate, or to be exact, to tell his great story.
The painter Vojo Stanić once said in an interview that he is only expressing the apathy of today’s human. We are surrounded with lack of meaning, with violence, destruction, and a lot is exposed to aggression, leading to escaping into illusory worlds, escapism, exoticism and utopianism. The contemporary environment made this artist retreat from avant-garde and experiment. He found his own painting and sanctuary, and that return is in the spirit of old artists famous in history as ”small masters”. Dejan Medaković wittily remarked that they are not small at all, implying that the history of art is subject to criticism and revision.

SEDUCING BY POETIC REALISM

Radivojević’s approach to the painting is sensual, Eros-like and emotional. Models for nudes are beautiful young girls, present in his private and public life. As a hedonist, he does not paint female human beings only realistically, passionately undressing them with the look of an experienced observer. With his attention, he seduces and poetizes them. The foreground does not include bodily beauty but aestheticization, dominance of poetic realism over hyper-real reality. His interest in nudity is so different from avant-garde body art and experiments in the contemporary stage, that we could call him counter-revolutionary, in the sense of De Mestro.
Where does this huge melancholy in these nudes and still-lives, many of them belonging to very good pieces of figurative painting, come from then? For this painter, women are muses and priestesses, introduced into the secrets of life and fate. He never possesses them completely, because he considers them unreachable. This admiration, the inability of a man to know and possess a woman completely, connects him with the past, with the ideality expressed by the old masters. The key of historical painting is in sexuality, perhaps also sentimentality. Radivojević not only belongs to the poetics of modern realism, he is also a true anachronist, painter of memory, melancholic and researcher of great ancient presentations. Aware of the sensibility with which artists from the periods of symbolism and belle epoque presented eternal femininity, sofia, femme fatal, vamps and vampirellas, faustines of eloquent nobility, he returned to supreme wisdom.
With his naive conviction that he can change something in the cruel world of demonized economy divided into (as Nikolai Berdyaev forecasted almost a hundred years ago) techno-people and barbarians, with the magic of beings and objects, gates and children he paints consistently, dedicatedly and heartedly every day, Radivojević is unique and privileged.