The Reality of Illusion
(Or the character and importance of Miloje Markovic's painting process)

There exists one experience of fine art being sedimented for centuries, art as a part of visual culture that cannot be connected to any style, time, movement or trend. Fine art is a substance of language, picture, drawing or sculpture as well as a part of reproductive technique which want to get the status of aesthetic. In a limited sense, fine art is the language itself that has its grammar, syntax, history and philosophy and, according to that, it is in some way discursive. The picture and the word are in constant interdependence, in continual penetration, thus they cannot replace one another.

Maybe it looks paradoxical, but for me, the painting of M. Markovic, being seemingly simple is interesting with its language provocation, for several its illusions and significant approximations. How to place this painting? How to determine its structure, style and time dimensions? Is this the realism and what kind of it? Being aware of the brief analysis and simple conclusions, I shall make an analysis of this painting in its whole sense; the painting which is not actual (or "actual" to emphasize the double significant level of the statement, ironical and relative). Thus, this painting does not hide in itself any intention that can be the subject to the requirements of the postmodernism which does not acknowledge either the integrity of history or the integrity of reality. From the sphere of this postmodernism, the subject as well as the reality are excluded, only the relationship between them remains, the relationship that is manifested as the privilege of the subject to eclecticism. The experiment has been introduced as the first principle of creative consciousness, the experiment with the history, matter and the theory of art and with the aim to separate and dismiss forever one from another the elements of the entity of the picture itself: the idea, matter, vision, technique, subjective consciousness, the emotion. This disunion of the entity of the picture, done by force, is at the same time the disunion of the entity of the painter who scarifies the unity of his internal world with the aim to be in the matter or only in idea. But, the matter as well as the language of fine art does not precede the picture: the first picture has been the first form of the fine arts' language.

Secondly, already a little forgotten issue of the mimesis might be put, in that Aristotelian sense, in which an artistic piece (or the procedure of its creation) is a true transformation of visible reality into one of artistic media. Does this painting live from the removal of difference between a physical and esthetic fact? Or perhaps a new meaningful dimension was found between the painter's intention and the object world? Iconographycally, the painting is very simple: several objects, arranged as still life (a jug, a clock, a little pot, a censer, tiling, a rug and the almost inevitable old wooden chair) are composed in the central part of the painting, most often horizontally. By their shape and colour those objects most seriously complete by their truthfulness with models after which they were painted. The background "neutral" finely painted surface with light ochre or gray, like an illuminated part of some unreal wall. And, one would say, that would be all. But, behind that statics an existing subtle and difficult to understand process of creation a painting is hidden. First of all, the painter destroys that meaningful unity of objects which acquired in their prelife and transforms them into obedient models which accept to be a shape, a colour, a proportion of sizes always in a different context from one painting to another. By skillful hand, the painter brings the likeness to perfection: objects are here before the eye, but before the fingers too: they irresistibly seek our touches. However, this duality of their is solely illusory. Suddenly, we reveal the essence: the physics has been transformed into metaphysics. We entered the space of those "other worlds" hidden beyond consciousness, sight, beyond frail shell of physical phenomena. As if we are speaking of a higher, creative operation - about creation of absolute reality of a painting based on illusory reality of objects. Maybe this was the reason why the painting material, coloration, accumulation of colour and foundation has been brought to a minimum. There is no gesture, violent stroke, nervous structure. As if we were in front of an icon-painter's piece - the objects have almost the character of a sacral thing. The span in the painting is indefined, open and vague, so that it resembles the segment of infinity. This is neither a room, a temple nor a hall, but the illuminated space itself in which sacred objects live and where all ideas of time, distance and relations are lost.

One must exclude the principles of classic realism from this painting and - most of all - the principles of hyperrealism. With a great caution I think of a term "metarealism" in the meaning which conveys to the term a possibility to transmit "realistically" that which is invisible: abstract quality of a spiritual world and the sole substance of time which gives the valuable dimension of sense only to an illusion. Thus, we cannot speak here of the national exotics and especially nationalistic folklore, regardless of the fact that the objects in the painting can be recognized in the spirit of a national tradition. Markovic succeeded to touch that layer of objects'-existence which is not only beyond the limits of real but also beyond the horizon of possible. The miracle is exactly in the fact that the objects which settle these paintings do not have in the author's idea, the intention to be transformed into abstract categories of philosophical esthetic thinking; on the contrary, they tend to illusionary resemblance to their object equivalents. True enough, the objects here are more subjects, they have their own image and speech, their destiny, traces of clashes and scars and they are at their best when they are free form necessity to abandon their impressive silence.

For decades already, we have been listening to the cry for the actual, as if for some new hope of creation a new sense of the art. To the present, we should have had a vast fund of new artistic values, authentic and timeless, and we received only particles of a lost reality, physical and spiritual. Modern negation of one reality has not provided conditions for creation of other, more supreme reality of human world.
The painting of Miloje Markovic is a part of a permanent nostalgy for another world balanced and final, which could be created by illusion only. And thus his illusion is real and comforting.

Sreto Bosnjak