Articles

The paintings of Miloje Markovic are reminiscent of the golden days of our realistic painting, of that almost forgotten time of glory of Dorde Krstic, Uros Predic, and Paja Jovanovic, still living in some people's memory as the only time in which there was harmony between art and reality.

The painter Miloje Markovic is a specific offshoot of that unprompted, but persistently present Utopian longing of ours for a final reconciliation between the painting and the world in the aura of a tranquilizing and refreshing realism. It is interesting to note that this lonely and until yesterday unknown painter, with the intuition of a real postmodernist, finds a proving ground for that (utopian) possible reconciliation in the seemingly obscure environment of objects of folkloristic and ethnographic origin. A peasant leather coat, canteen, kettle, gourd, earthenware dish used for baking bread, dented milk bucket, spinning wheel, and an old, murky oil lamp, these are the objects which, in the light of a hyper-realistic artistic perception, become a kind of symbols of our return to the world of things, the way it is. There is an interesting position, held not only by Markovic that, after all knowledge and experiences which are behind us, we cannot go back to where we were and to where we came from, to shabby objects of technical origin and awfully boring ambiences of industrial civilization, over which requiems have been sung so many times to our alienation from the world. We cannot go back to modernism, which is actually European. We can go back only to our own sources.

The painter Miloje Markovic is one of the lonely harbingers of that possible new fervor of our art still smoldering somewhere under the ashes of its tiredness with wisdom.

Dorde Kadijevic, Art Critic

Back to Articles