Archaeofuturism of Goran Mitrović

Dejan Djorić on the exhibition of Goran Mitrović at the Dar-Mar gallery in Belgrade in 2022

The entire history of recent Serbian figuration is determined by two key artistic movements. It was formed in the nineteenth century in the spirit of two great stylistic formations - realism and fantasy. Aiming for the future, it changes forms but not foundations. The painter Goran Mitrović (Sremska Mitrovica, 1968) is in this sense one of the most unique and original on the Serbian art scene. He started as a painter who was not interested in drawing and graphics, and from his first exhibitions in the early nineties, he continued as a distinct realist, a representative of a rare breed of so-called native realism, that unique Serbian contribution to the history of world realism. His most realistic scenes, however, are always imbued with the irrational atmosphere of the magically understood object world and then with various representations of horrors and discoveries of folk mysticism. Weddings of scarecrows, a war of scarecrows, also led to a war of machines, a revived empire of waste and garbage, but not in the urban, Sheik's spirit, but understood in ethnic terms. So gradually this master turned more and more towards strange worlds, lifting his spirit into the distant regions of imagination, towards a fantasy that owes nothing to Mediala, the Zemun group or anything seen in these two centuries. Mitrović is self-possessed, and these aesthetic changes are only made possible by his great artistic gift, in the background of all those memories of the realms of life and death.

After the year 2000, his palette and iconography changed from extremely dark, which marked the chthonic worlds of the monstrous and terrestrial to the solar and heavenly. With who knows what kind of spiritual twist, the painter discovered bright scenes of flying bodies and aerial phenomena. It is about the vessels that inhabited the subconscious world of man before it soared into the sky and the cosmos. It is a colorfully bright and spiritually joyful fantasy of someone who almost ascetically succeeded in freeing himself from the darkness of dark scenes, no matter how skillfully and overwhelmingly they were depicted, and stepped into the world of spiritual freedom.

Before the observer, therefore, is a new type of dreaming, Uranian and not chthonic, coming out of night into day, from darkness to light. Sigmund Freud noticed that dreams are close to myths, and Mihajlo Đoković Tikalo, writing about a realist, in the foreword in the catalog and not knowing about Freud's thesis, says: "Dreams are a kind of camouflaged mythology". With Mitrović, anthropology is always in the foreground; although physically absent, never directly represented, but only indirectly, through his objects and creations, man is a measure in the background of this magical world of the underground and the sky. Anthropologically understood fantasy implies layering, the abyss opens downwards and upwards, towards the occult and towards the divine. The result is basically a humanized vision, at the other aesthetic end of dehumanized geometric abstraction, countless attacks on the body and soul of man in various forms, not only the avant-garde of neo-conceptualism, robotic practice and the "death of art". Mitrović would like to save and elevate perhaps the fairy world rather than the human world, the ancient Balkan myths of blood and soil, beings and atmosphere that are being destroyed by technical civilization. Ancient and contemporary, because his paintings open to children with optimism, this painter goes deep into the dreamlike, mythical and otherworldly.

He only communicates eternal truths, his artistic world is universal and not only local. With these visions, a richly and densely woven parallel reality is expressed, which cannot be put into the molds of folklore, ethnology, philosophy or history. The painter brings to the stage beings, objects, events and atmospheres that can only be partially rooted in the human world, his theatrum mundi is a mirror of the world. Processions, rotations and swirls take place in a special time and space, the reality of which excites, thanks to the painter's power to summon and depict them. These are the events that precede the story of our age as a form of archeology of the imagination, scenes from some ideal, happier and more complete world and time. Present and as a collective being from the subconscious, the scarecrow becomes cheerful, on a revolving merry-go-round. This fantasy is imbued with humor. It should not be forgotten that the appearances of the fantastic in ancient Greece were also linked to the comic and the caricature, which was explored as a peculiarity of irrational art by the great connoisseur, the East German art historian Wilhelm Fraenger, one of the greatest experts on the life and work of Hieronymus Bosch.

The audience and critics could not be convinced of the truth of Mitrović's content if they did not see a strong and clear performance, which would not have been possible if it had not been experienced. It is about the mythical reality, the transition from the previous dangerous, threatening world to an easier and more humane one. As Mircea Eliade would say, the painter "tells a sacred story, an event that took place in primeval time, in the age of beginnings." There is something of the universally known myth of the golden age and paradise in this artist's recent works. Mitrović's reality begins to exist in our imagination, where it is liberating as a key corrective to reality. We are witnessing the painter's bliss of discovery, the mystery of unraveling, as Jacques Brill would say. Mitrović's universe is similar to the one that appears in the gap of time, when the rational restraints loosen. His painting is, among other things, procession, ritual, carnival, feverish, festive and solemn, captured in moments of rapture or happy relaxation. It is like a masquerade, currents and a festival, when the community falls into a trance. As a transition to other dimensions of existence, his merry-go-rounds spin, balloons and airships fly, Zeppelins from collective innocence and subconsciousness about the still unconquered, untorn sky. Mitrović celebrates the birth of a world that took place long ago. This is possible only in painting with such believability, in which the mythical is manifested transferred from language and story into a universal non-verbal language. The revival and actualization of some ancient period of evolution of an individual or a group is in theory called recapitulation. The transition of this master from dark folklore to archaeofuturism, aeronautics from the future past, is not a sign of (post)modern "private mythology" as the egoistic creation of pseudomythical worlds by modern and contemporary artists. His phantasmatic transformations are ahistorical, thus collective, deeply rooted in the subconscious. Children and adults spinning on the merry-go-round (in German: game on the circle) are happy, and this painting evokes those eternal moments in time. Myth, therefore, is a property of man as a species, as Jacques Brill writes in the book Lilith or the Dark Mother. Even now, after all, the painting is a reflection of an unbroken connection with tradition, and Mitrović also puts the machine in the function of antiquity. In this capacity are also his extensions of the image towards the object, the exit from the canvas into the third dimension, towards the relief and assemblage. So now we see that he also creates objects, small sculptures of houses with figures as in the niche of the altar, which joyfully remind of old Swiss watches with a bird.

Contrary to the analytical, so-called of the "poor", primary and destructive art of the post-avant-garde, Mitrović's is integrative, as a synthesis in space and time of scattered, fragmented details, things, figures, stories and ideas. Instead of their distortion, deformation as one of the principles of new art, our painter joins together fragments, reduces the spiritual shortening and dismemberment of (post)modern man in his pictorial archeology of imagination. "Actually, there are several levels of integration of mythical content" to use the words of Jacques Brill. Perhaps all this is just a noble dream, different from a nightmare, Jung's "big dream" that encompasses centuries, space and time, people, general and local homo sapiens.

Mitrović's story is like a fairy tale, it refers to the essential and heals the soul of the observer who is overwhelmed by the demons of soulless modernity. It transfers it to the sphere of culture that is always small and intimate, instead of a civilization that strives for self-denial and self-destruction. These images are illuminated because not only Jehovah, Savaot, is the God of light, but he was once the great god Ptah or the sun of Memphis, who creates living beings. The reality of the image is always latent, on the border between worlds. The ahistoricity and non-objectivity of such a creation does not mean that it cannot be created as a large fresco of the overcoming of narrow motives and the disintegration of the whole picture of the world in this time.

Dejan Đorić