Painting of Dragan Jovanovic (1964), which separated from the magisterial course of his former creative work, and which in the last three years has been increased in number and various topics, demands a serious critical evaluation. Owing to his two-decade long occupation with icon-painting, not deviating from the traditional medium where he is perfect, Jovanovic goes into a venture to create a different, less canonical vision of the world based on morals and experience he has gained, but a vision that the more it suits his temperament, the more it is full of genuine pathos and meditation. Instead of hieratic and archetypal forms with which the icon presents something lying beyond, God's over-wisdom, a comforting truth about the end of all pains, in front of us there is a lyrically spread space, filled with strange happenings: removals and migrations, finished and unfinished chess matches, strange travelers who wander around celestial and cosmic wide space, spider-like drawing artists and very short pencils, toys and insects. Having been set in a special scenography, in front of the heaven's stage whose windows open into the heaven beyond the heaven, brought together by an endless journey, departure and meetings, these motifs represent the base of Jovanovic's visual vocabulary and endlessly inspire his joyful, hymn-like vision. In such unstable space which is always changing, opening into new horizons and reviving, owing to the multiplication of Jovanovic's 'bestialities', and in the play of motifs that are on the edge between a portrait and a symbol lies a challenge of interpretation, but there is also a drama and salvation of Jovanovic's art. Where do gigantic insects, dolphins and turtles travel? In which distant country do ships and cars, which go where it's only possible to fly, carry colourful eggs and chess-pieces? Who draws the moves in chess matches that take place at some levels we can hardly understand, and who are the inhabitants of megalopolis built on the ships' hulls who, like a castle in the air from a fairytale, lie "˜hanging in the air'? The answer to these and many other enigmas that are placed before us by Jovanovic's painting is hidden in his painting itself, in its being and nature, in the coats of paints that lie on the wooden board, graded and measured in the way that in the totality of his vision they make the impression of brightness, airiness and lightness. In that vision, the spider-like drawing artist, in whom we recognize the painter himself, spreads his invisible threads and in his net lies the totality of everything that exists: in the airy, heavenly sound everything shines, washed with the celestial brightness of wedding of the heavenly and temporal world. From this point of view, Jovanovic's painting still stands on the ground of the icon and icon-painting: all his motifs are materialized in the same way, and portrayed faces reveal the characteristics of ideal types more than the characteristics of personal features in their appearances. At the same time, moving a step forward, at the beginning of our century, his painting lies like a witness of the meeting of last epochs and a storage of long lasting knowledge and experience, because of which in its genealogy among numerous influences one recognizes searching for a synthesis and the integral in the creative work where his forerunners are the artists from the group Mediala. Let's finally ask one more question: who is Dragan Jovanovic? A spider that draws invisible lines of the drawing in these paintings, a short pencil which can be, at the same time, an embryo of the whole universe or a rhapsodic dragon that separated from the earth and sneaked into the space where our persistent glances can't reach and where our understanding reveals the uselessness of its efforts? All these three and above all an eternal boy and a restless nomad, who, like Noah, built his boat and set out into the endless wandering around cosmic spaces, so that he can save his boyhood in a constant play, wondering and discovering.
Miodrag Danilovic
