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An art, it might be claimed with slight
exaggeration, which is the especial reserve of artists deriving
from regions east of us. That’s where they know best how to paint
such sacred nocturnes, how to perform the astral liturgy. Mirso
Bajramovic too is one who paints `Hymns to Night`. He too follows
Jean Cocteau’s poetical direction of `carrying night through day`,
extending the possible world of the dream into the profane world
of up-to-datedness. But he is not just a painter of nocturnes and
`Night thoughts`. He is also a commonsensical man with a Western
inquisitiveness about the system, the anatomy of romantic imagery.
I say: part of his art is about art and even that Art creates art.
This did not make him a post-modernist. To him the modern
tradition is not `old news`, a decrepit archive, ’Yesterday’s
Papers`, from which one may legally quote from memory. No, he
remained IN the tradition. Which is still as fully operative in
former Yugoslavia as
it is in the whole of Europe.So Mirso Bajramovic is not simply an
artist who carries night through day, he also wants the sun to
shine in the darkness, make the light of reason clarify the dream.
Or rather: he comes up to the arch-aphorist Karl Kraus’
expectations about people who dare call themselves artists: `An
artist is someone who manages to change a solution into a mystery.`
What does he do with that mystery, this happy artist? No, he does
not solve it. He starts to search for her whom G.B. Shaw named
`the sphinx without mysteries` - the muse, maybe. What she does
and wants Bajramovic to do, what she still has in store for him,
is and should be a mystery for now. What is certain,
notwithstanding, is this: first Bajramovic silenced me, then he
made me speak interminably. May I be forgiven for both.
Maarten Beks -Dutch art magazine “Kunstbeeld” (fragment) |
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