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VELIZAR KRSTIC was born on September 10, 1947, in Oreovac, near Nis. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1972, as a student of professor Djordje Bosan and finished postgraduate studies in 1976, in the class of the same professor. Having been recommended by Petar Lubarda, the winner of the Herder Prize, he was awarded scholarship by the F.V.S. Foundation from Hamburg, and studied art at the Wienna Art Academy, the class of professor Walter Eckert, in the academic year of 1973/74. He was also awarded scholarship by the Greek Government, and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Athens, in the class of professor Konstantin Gramatopulos, in 1978/79. At present he teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. |
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Deformation is always the consequence of some other, to the being and things strange powers, strange even when they are self- contained. And those very powers, the energy which turns natural currents to negative processes, provokes Krstic's artistic consciousness. But one would be wrong to think that it exhausts the motives and reasons for producing such a vast number of canvases with such drastic obstructions of natural form and its "use" in the painting vocabulary. Krstic neither renounces the natural form, nor does he abolish it as a psychological or an artistic-linguistic fact, but by defining contents of his message he reduces it to its substantial character. freeing it from any context of its real state. It is not reduced to association, to broken meaningful thread, surrealistic fragment or an illusion of totality. We don't know how much, in the form thus structured, the magical magma of the unconscious is present, and how much a keen eye of the conscious, but it is certain that unity of all linguistic elements in the structure of a painting has been achieved. Such treatment of form Krstic bases upon two, only at first glance, contradictory principles: the principle of deformation and the principle of reconciliation.
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We have already said that deformation is a permanent way of determining pictorial character of form, characteristic for Krstic's painting from his very beginnings. Principle of reconciliation results in aspiration for a single, individual act, to be reduced to itself, in spite of destructive powers of decomposition and entropy. So that the process may be arrested at a certain stage. It is a catharsis, tranquility, withdrawal into entity, completeness. Therefore among vigorous expression, invisible rage of gesture, brutal shortening and limitness of canvas lies an empty space which permanently challenges the painter to new attempts. That is why opuses and whole series treat almost the same problems but on a higher emotional and expressive level.
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Krstic's canvases can neither be understood nor felt without an effort to identify his poetics as negative aesthetic experience, an indifference to "beauty", harmony and sentiment. Ontogenesis of his painting appears as a process of ascetic rejection of any pleasing form and relating it to an "embelished world". The whole concept of his art proposes another function by aesthetically established form: symbolic negation of reality, its opening to possibilities of judgment and deconstruction. No heuristics would help us reach authentic truth of Krstic's painting if we weren't initially prepared for the challenge of an aesthetic mind which overthrows priority of social status over spiritual experience of the painter.
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For Krstic, the figure (image, form) is the primary fact on which he builds the structure of a painting. Figure, and not appearance! A difficult task, indeed, self-imposed. By a single figure or image, and very often without a logical relation to the background, he presents and expresses his entire thought, intention and experience, the entire complexity of phenomena countless in meaning, which provoke our sensibility. On canvas there is no dialogue of figure to figure, figure to object or, if it exists, it is reduced to minimum. An exception make earlier works with certain interaction between the object and the background, although even they live predominantly from their solitude and inner fullness of expression. However, it is not the solitude that the late Frances Bacon talked about: "To single out (a figure), means to find the simplest, the inevitable way out, although not always sufficient, to avoid appearance, to interrupt narration, to free a figure: to keep to fact". In Bacon' s work, it is basically the tendency for a pure sign, an abstract entity of the visual. In Krstic's work the figure is active, clearly oriented to depths of experience, world of strong feelings. It does not speak the language of actual ideologies, of fashionable trends, philosophy, and some "applied" aesthetics. The "tale" told in it is portraied through powerful unity of experience and language, the language of experience, spiritual maturity of being, set out for great negation of the world. This is the language of great gesture, pathetic and loud, dramatic in means and intention, disturbing and sharp. When pictorial means become insufficient, he reaches for application of other materials, builds relief surfaces transforming a painting into an object. Or goes into fierce deformation and illogical combination of organic entities, combining the uncombinable. |
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The process of dramatization is evident in the use of color: Krstic sometimes substitutes form for color, or reduces it to a marginal line of the pictorial plane. Application of the paint is thick, clear, applied one above the other, in distinct harmony of contrast, sufficient in itself. Paradoxally enough, the coloristic potential, raised to paroxysm, manages to remain a part of an imaginative, complete pictorial factum. Intriguing are the works, objects-columns with portraits of real or fictitious warriors, placed as friezes of solitary medallions. Those objects resemble large rotuli that keep secrets of many destinies, and by unfolding them we would read out fragments of sadness, unspeakable silence and sacral peace. As if the open, pathetic pictorial mind of Velizar Krstic has calmed down confronted with all abyss of an unknown experience, less aesthetic than ethic, so consequently the pictorial language has abandoned force, transforming into whisper or silence. |
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E-mail: krstic@YUbusiness.co.yu
VELIZAR KRSTIC - BIOGRAPHY
