WELCOME TO NEODECADENCE
A symbol, by it’s very nature, refers to an absent reality. In matmatics it signifies an unknown quantity, in religion, poetry or art it lends substance to an unknown quality – a value that remains out of reach. In a religious context , this quality is unknown ( or unknowable becose it belongs to a different order of reality – a supernatural order – and can therefore be signified only by a sacred object. The sacred in this view, is merely, a semantic category and should not be confused with the divine, as the chinese sage puts it, one must not confuse the moon with the finger that points to it. But even irreligious must acknowledge that there are things to which we cannot directly refer.
We need symbols to communicate these things.
… and I was just a kid when I communicated for the first time. The replica of one of Böcklin’s paintings “Isle of the Dead” was placed in my father friend’s living room, an architect and art lover, who was with a kind smile upon his face and infinite patience answering a burst of questions posed restlessly by a child obssessed with the picture which was by far surpassing the power of understanding art for those of his age. He was entertaining while besieged by the five-year old who was so much thrilled with the curiosity of his own and apparently enjoyed in meditative and mythological encirclement of death. It was my first encounter with art in the way it should be experienced and the passion awoken at that moment has not left me ever since. For years I have been trying to comprehend the feeling I had then and whatever I did later, I always returned to my original impulse.
Through personal development and education, I have become a great admirer of music, which has through my entire life generated a motivating circumstances under which my work has been created. My general predilection to music and art came from the quality environment where I was raised, just like the passion for expressing myself exclusively through pencil drawing developed under a close presence and influence of artist Dimitrije Popović. This brought to the renewal of my personal interests for classical styles, Rennaisance in particular, which were pushed aside a bit while I was preoccupied with design and contemporary arts.
One of the most emphasized features of my early work is that it was created under a strong influence of surrealists like Dimitrije, Dali and Giger, but in later period it more and more inclines to symbolism, from which a personal expression inspired by other prominent artists, architects, writers and philosophers like Leonardo, Caravaggio, Van de Velde, Gaudi, Klimt, Munch, Jean Delville, Goya, William Morris, Alphonse Mucha, Peter Behrens, Victor Horta, Dürer, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Thomas More and Karl Marx has been formed.
A creative atmosphere in which I live and work day after day is the debit I owe to a number of contemporaries like The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Weather Report, King Crimson, Dream Theater, Monty Pythons, Richard Taylor, Michael Moore, Douglas Adams, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and many others.
Drawing the parallels between the time in the past when these outstanding men lived and expressed their natural talents through their work and the present, I am trying to explain the most profound ideas as far as the influence on my personal approach is concerned, as well as to disclose my personal attitudes, something that permeates my entire work, consciously putting myself into a risk of getting into controversies which so often used to be an unavoidable part in their formation.