Mythology of ordinary life

I n Vojo Stanic's painting the most important is, I think, create mythologies of ordinary life. It is the only mythology that we do not see often and which, perhaps, does not exist anywhere in the world. It can be represented by an anecdote from the second half of the last century, which has repeatedly told Serbian painter Mica Popovic, and refers to the Stanic's personality and essence of his artistic part.

On the Stanic's independent exhibition Mica Popovic wanted to buy one of his picture, and interested from where he draws inspiration for all these motives. However, Vojo got angry and told him: "You want to buy my picture, are you crazy? If you like, come in Herceg novi, so You can paint it yourself, all you can see from my window!"

That is only partially true. What Vojo see, what one artist can see, only in the artistic treatment begins to transceding.

That ordinary life as he saw it, made from small everyday things, from scenes that look like ordinary, everyday, in its processing and its distorted mirror become "unusual scenes of ordinary details - and from these unusual scenes he composed his ordinary paintings". His paintings retained beyond the substance of ordinary fragmented scenes but his spirit transced and translates the language of the ordinary in a strange dimension of surreal, naive and emotional in every sense.

In Breson's photos or in post-war French movies, we find sequences that make ordinary life. From them, part of ordinary life upgrade later as something banal, brought to the mythical. If I thought in these categories, then Vojo Stanic is managed to bring banal to the mythical, and ordinary life decompose by the situation, and actually perform as an ultimate and human life trumps.

In the history of painting there are equivalents from Magritte to the surrealist which they were able to lead us into a metaphysical level, but they kill our joy. They are us, as opposed to Stanic, frightened and somehow left alone. Let us remember the loneliness and existential anger that radiate their paintings and compare them with works of Vojo Stanic. We again come to the same conclusion, that the existential anger, human alienation and loneliness exist, but they are outdated by carnival and festival dimension of life that he finds in ordinary scenes. And his painting is based on a Dionysian brain that applies to ordinary life. And this is the mythology of ordinary life which builds in the surreal structure of his painting.

Painter - acrobat

Vojo's paintings are universal because they are naturally defined as a Mediterranean culture. It's an easy culture illuminated with ocher reddish light, glowing yellow, with all the colors to gray and blue, but in the dominant ocher tone. The tone is the base of aesthetic experience of joy and elation that it does, as a separate engine pulls through life, especially through his painting. There is not a painter from our ground whose images are viewed with great joy and glee as they watch the images of Vojo Stanic. Yet, it is not merely the joy from a Hollywood's plot. It is the joy that somebody managed to compose our ingredients in their composition, to draw us into a secret of his strange situation in which we believe and which have been left - when we understand, and when we do not understand.

And when we give extremely complex art epithets to the painting, it had always has what Vojo has - that naive boyish approach got his trapeze artist painter over time, the painter who illuminated amazing everything he wants.