REVIEWS
The reasons why ILIJA PAUNOVIC – shortly after finishing the studies of painting, under the tutorship of Zora Petrovic and later Milo Milunovic – withdrew from the public art life, explain the essence of his creative nature, spiritually following the authentic artists whose common bases were not of esthetic but ethic nature. Ilija Paunovic could not accept easily other people’s ideas and conceptions, however they were real and contemporary. Unable to oppose the assault of various forms of abstractions, supported aggressively by art critics of the sixties of the past century, that rushed and destroyed everything on Yugoslav artistic field, Paunovic devoted himself to pedagogic work, enjoyed frequent travels, lived a careless bohemian life.
Luckily, it seems that the spark struck by his excellent professors burst into a creative blaze at his mature age. It is hard to explain what made him continue where he stopped and make up lost time. He paints as if he were in a fever frightened to leave something unfinished or unpainted. He organizes exhibition after exhibition.
Firmly following the instructions of his professors – Milunovic’s clever painting, his unyielding personality on one side, and the power of gesture of Zora Petrovic on the other side, which is mixed with the colorful fireworks, the colors of Milan Konjovic, who is of similar origin and temper – Paunovic creates a remarkable artistic poetics imbued with the spirit of postmodern art. His painting is a mixture of classical and modern, deja vue and new, and the author as an artistically aware person expresses his own art; essential values of his work resulting from the artist’s spontaneous sincerity giving his soul to his paintings. It is his creative virtue that provides him a prominent role in the Serbian contemporary fine art.
Nikola Kusovac
If you opened the twentieth century fine arts book, you would see a lot of creations and decadence, many trends and dead and streets, variety of styles and productions. You could see duration as an axiom, the energy of art as a creative power, struggle for an individuality in the challenges of all social evils we have message of a painting, that it has not anything new to express, when we noted its transformations amongst modern technologies and pressures from their visual, nobody else but Ilija Paunovic unexpectedly appeared.
His painting is the painting of colors and emotions. Inspiration is at real distance. The subject is environment, a part of his privacy, ordinary situations and everyday life. His themes (topics) and figurative painting present us existential and emotional life of an average man. It is personal painting. By his paintings he tells us his life story, presentiments, fears, pain. That story is his colour. The colour, with its quality and gesture, silt, defines and later expresses emotions. It materializes emotion, builds the tissue of the painting. It excites, motivates, and provokes emotions. Ilija Paunovic knows that he will, with the conflict of black and red, the energetic gesture, show that a classical painting can be very contemporary, and engaged in the current social and artistic events. The existence of the paintings is its credibility. It is the proof of the author’s existence and its dignity.
Radmila Savcic
Ilija Paunovic with youthful zeal and passion in the way typical only for him continues poetics of colorful expressionism that we have been following since the beginning of the twentieth century, and which is still present in various forms and aspects. However, it should be emphasized that he does not imitate the trends because, as a good expert, he is convinced that an artist should express what he has inside himself and should aim at his own goal. The opus of Milan Konjovic, one of the most respectable representatives of the national expressionism, is divided into the periods of sensitivity, passion and spirituality. Maybe, in a few decades, researchers will find out that Paunovic’s path of development was the same as Konjovic’s one, but at this moment we do not know the periods he has passed through or cannot imagine the ones he will experience. But, we can conclude easily that passion is a common denominator for his paintings created in the last ten years.
Most often he paints a window with flowers as memory of his mother, so that sensitivity prevails over the passion of creative acting, grotesque scenes with refugees, trams, girl florists, stray dogs, and other details, the help him to realize desired meanings. Birds in an area or undefined space, maybe, as a symbol of freedom and unrestriction, allegorical compositions, taken out from the myths but connected with real events in our everyday life. That is why Paunovic’s paintings, above all, are the shriek of an artist not indifferent toward his own and anybody else’s sufferings, uncertainty of life, existentialist turbulence as well as human temporariness and immortality of arts.
Ljubica Miljkovic
