From the catalog of exhibition Scream-Genesis of motives, 2012.
In the beginning, there was an image. Image is older than thought and words, for we first create an image about some notion in our minds, and only after those images are expressed in the words.
We use image to present pain and happiness, darkness and light.
Thus, a painting with an image can bear all the burden of this world on its shoulders. When it possesses a quality, from its womb, even a sound approaches us, showing its health status, blood pressure and energy. It was Edvard Munch who showed us that a painting also has a sound, even the screaming, loud one.
In the presence of paintings by Dragan Marković Markus, we can hear a disturbing scream coming from them.
His paintings, with their mouths wide open, represent on our faces the reflection of world health status.
The abyss of our mouths is proportional to the defeat of our hopes for better future. Since the first ditch we were not able to cross over successfully, through the series of ravines where we got stuck in and suffocated, until the abyss where we are now sinking down, our mouths, wide open, show the real portrait of ourselves.
Markus can clearly see it and confirms, without any beautification and make up. Dragan Marković Markus is screaming from his paintings, as we all are, but no one can hear us.
If, one day, all of us scream loudly together as one, so loudly that the image our portraits becomes only a red abyss, full and infinite, as our wish for everyone to hear us, only then the world can change. Markus' paintings were created in one breath, in several strong and effective strokes. This work confirms, in daring and significant manner, that we are conscious of our existence
Miloš Šobajić
Author's words:
There are two dominant energies present in the motif of scream, the energy of that very motif as a catharsis of human emotion and the energy of expressive painting method, coming together as a synergy effect. The aim of this research is to determine the way knowledge of multilayeredness of motif expression in formal and semantic meaning contribute to forming personal art expression in the context of expressionistic procedure. Painting, although created within one direction or artistic influence, is of deep personal nature; search for the meaning of life occurs only within the boundaries of individual self-confirmation. My attention has been diverted to the painting's essence, viewed through specific prism of personal sensibility, in search for a painting serving as a personal reflection. Emotion, a full constitutional element of a painting, is a possible dominance in proved existence of traditional painting in the totalitarian era of digital media and the marginalization of humans and their individuality. No matter how my paintings, as well as the concept of my exhibition, are my subjective opinion and personal poetry, I reserve enough space for a spectator and his personal combinatorics, provoked by my visual expression.
Dragan Marković Markus
