Deep, Deeper in the Blue

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BLUE is one of the colors that, regardless of its par excellence cold nature, attracts both laymen and psychologists, artists of all directions and specialties, naives and professionals, and drives them to make interpretations. It is a color deeply engraved into the villages on Greek islands, the color used by pop-artist Yves Klein to coat the bodies of his models in an attempt to release them from the tyranny of “warm-bloodedness” and transport them into the spiritual world... The first association at all meridians of the globe is related to the sky and the sea, those most fluid and most mystic creations of Nature, the sources and variations of which come from spheres that even the man of science, or, on average, highly versed inhabitants of the planet in the present informatic age cannot, and never will, completely come to understand. It has, being secretive and distant, refreshing and calming, found great application in graphic design and in the shaping of everyday existence – from the uniforms to the operation menus of digital devices... Slobodan Kastavarac approached it as a great challenge, with untold possibilities of expression and dialogue with his, already richly developed, world of symbols. Using acryllics, with broad brushstrokes, the finely nuanced background on paper surface in rich pastel variations from cerulean blue to turquoise blue-green, represents an ethereal, fluid, shifting arena for the visual event. Enjoying in the phenomenon and in subtle shifts of this color, the artist sets them in motion and emphasizes them in countless aspects. By intervening with “Conte” dry crayon of white line, he achieves the effect of the powerful graphism simply emerging out of the infinite, and by painting in the manner of “spattering” by lighter colors, he makes forms freely float through space, offering the impression of an unencompassed view. Dark, almost black passages behave in quite the opposite way, immersing themselves in the maëlstrom of fluids deeply, ever more deeply...

By following these processes, we ourselves gradually become their part, carried like Jonatan Livingston Seagull by the seductive attraction of “hights above hights”, where all sounds, masses, distances of the natural and earthly world eventually disappear. The symbolics arising from these foils are not the fruit of permanent obsessions that would strive toward narration or the transfer of particular meanings or emotions. On the contrary, it is at the same time fluid and shifting, transparent and palpable, because it comes from the heart of creation of the “plastic sign”, from yielding to a medium which, in order to be so compound and mystical, has to be “carried” on the secure wings of knowing and feeling the pictorial matter itself. Paintings from this cycle, more strongly than any other from the artist’s entire opus, invite to a flight through the whirlwinds of time-space, a flight where we shall lose nothing but the burden of the material, soaring ever deeper and ever more lightly into our own spirituality, in the precious, omnipresent, divine BLUE...

 

Mirjana Vajdic Bajic

September 2007