Three Friends
Dušan Perić - Goran Kauzlarić - Petar Perić.
Let’s start with a story, the story that the three friends are telling and that is partly reflected in this exhibition. In some cases it has to be imaginary completed, because there are some older works that are not presented here.
DUŠAN shows a man who stands, dressed in blue jeans and rough working shoes. He occasionally swims and dives - in peaked, sharp waves, occasionally searches and fights and sometimes he is lost, without orientation. He is stumbling. Masquerade can fall. Up and down, shoes and head are forming the base. An elongated neck is about an ambitious vertical.
GORAN informs about a huge man, about a real giant, who has grown from burning, liquid, soil core. In addition, about a woman running towards us, that plays, here and there, with the ball (the earth). As well as about a machine from a pet-toy that looks more strange than animal. One of Goran’s heads occasionally becomes a fist or triumphs through music.
PETAR tightens a net and ridges over his bizarre scenario. He sketches a man who refuses to shower, dressed only in bathing trunks and holds his hand in a shape of revolver. His many characters, who beach their tongues boldly, seriously impair the image as a portrait, which intends to characterize an individual.
In the whole work of the three, a human being is present. It is tangible. We do not have to seek any further. It finds us. Departing from the human body, according to the curriculum of Serbian art faculties, is possible only during the later semesters, when students do not have to overlook the study of human model any more. But, how much is it possible to get separated of the figure then? Therefore, let us accept that the figure is here.
It exists, it will not be denied, especially not in the case of Dušan, Goran and Petar. It is equally not denied, as well as painting itself. And painting is present in its full materiality and youth. It is genuine and candid, not pretentious and not tensely. Paintings are inevitably heavy because of their strength. The image can directly reach us.
Fear of a human figure is denied. Figuration is not considered old-fashioned here; instead, its traditions are obviously respected. The figure is primarily a head. However, occasionally it is also a foot. And what about the inter space? There is a wide space between, a huge potential, which can be developed starting from the body. The bodies are fragmented, mirrored, re-composed. The sculpture is integrated into the painting, creating immediacy and eternity.
Here it is not about the individual problems of one generation, born in Yugoslavia in the late eighties. Painting choices are the central point - related to large existence issues. They are "young and wild”, yet they are astoundingly adult. Dušan, Goran and Petar formulate aphorisms. They are trying to create universality.
In Dušan’s, Goran’s and Petar’s paintings, it seems that the world's blue hissing spins around the red dyed archetypes of the original shapes. Brancusi appointed one of his heads “The Prometheus”. Is such humankind’s benefactor of culture rolling through the paintings of the three friends as well?
Rozanna Baltzer