Milica Todorović
PERICA DONKOV
With its vitalistic energy and specific use of the vocabulary of abstract expression, the deeply personalised painting of Perica Donkov has persistently resisted the challenges of various trends and the temptations of pluralistic moments in visual arts.
The result of his thirty-five long active presence on the artistic scene are his thirty-three solo shows held locally and abroad, his role of a protagonist of neo-informel in Serbian painting, his participation in numerous relevant national selections of painters, many awards … but, first of all, his entire autochthonous opus based – despite unavoidable, although not dramatic, stylistic changes – on an ontological constant, on his belief that painting is a spiritual response to civilisational plunge into abyss, that painting is a vehicle of individual authority in conquering the space of internal freedom.
From his first solo shows in mid-seventies to the present day, one can clearly recognise his scepticism towards narration, his endeavours to escape banal and direct speech, and his choice of a visual expression devoid of motifs and objectness. With its stronghold in the solely visual communication, the painting of Perica Donkov seemingly blurs its primary departure points hidden in the author’s disagreement with, or refusal of, the characteristic current social environment, but it has been metaphorically in collusion or dialogue with the reality, which it may sense prophetically (the black-white paintings of his early neo-informel phase) or acknowledge with disgust (his cycle Amor fati, directly provoked by the bombing of the city of Niš), or try to overcome searching a solution in the spheres outside the material (his cycles Axis mundi, Fugue …). Within the context of his works we detect his awareness of an endangered individual, of the existential anxiety of contemporary man, of alienation, destruction and general insecurity. By refusing to be a trophy of a far-from-rosy social reality, Donkov in fact uses the area of art to express auto reflexive states of heightened self-consciousness progressing towards the realisation of his own “universe” as the only possible spiritual solution. On the occasion of his solo exhibition in the ULUS Gallery in Belgrade in 2006, Donkov said the following: “I am creating a refuge, a personal space for the prayers of endangered individuals that know and resist nonsense. My works are icons of the one who believes in existence, duration and domination of the spiritual over the material.” His conceptual code has much in common with Kierkegaard’s ideas, with the philosophy of existentialism or the writings of Dostoyevsky. If we allow ourselves the liberty to define the conceptual level of Perica Donkov’s painting in a single phrase, the maxim would be – departure points in the material/real, realisations in the spiritual.
(Complete text in printed edition)
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