Milan Markovic
VR Exhibition

Interested in duality of the natural dynamics opposed to willful action, Milan Marković followed the principle and practice of experimental improvisation that led him towards the rich tradition of painterly engagement with gestural abstraction, providing a prism for his inner world. With his viscous, dynamic works the artist explores strong opposing forces: light and darkness, being and non-being, primitive and spiritual, Eastern minimalism and spontaneity combined with the non-linear action and expression of Western painting. The recurrent dynamics of his canvases convey simplicity of force and movement through vigorous sweeps of paint, their visual and sensory syntax reduced to the strongest graphic elements. Elementally assertive, they have no discernible narrative, and yet they are professed explorations of his personal universe. Each painting is a demonstration of energy by means of which it came into being, or, as El Lissitzky proposed in 1924, “a work is a stopping-place on the road of becoming”. Vital materiality of Marković’s art reached its nadir in his black paintings, where splatters, drips, diffusions and flows of changing density lent the merest hint of structure to the powerful cascades of darkness. The monochrome allowed significant physical and psychological depth on the flat exposed surface, providing a temporary loss of self or a detox from all meaning, after which followed a slow return to light, a construction of newfound luminosity through a spatial and structural battle via every fibre of canvas or a gritty particle that reflects or soaks the light.