GLIGOR ČEMERSKI'S PAINTING

Introduction

Čemerski has said: ”Byzantium discovers the painting in its primary form and in its totality…The miracle of this kind of painting lies exactly in the identical ease with which it swallows and digests mathematical speculations about the universe and the veristic and crude anecdote about the thing perceived and, simultaneously, leaves it all in the space of perfect balance between the domains of the spiritual and the senses. The visible as love, love as comprehension, comprehension as thought, thought as order and all of this as the defiant order of the dream, a whole series of the affective and the ritual are only the elements of this kind of painting whose property is the all-powerful translation into a painting - the miracle of the painting.” Thus, it seems as if Čemerski, practically at the very beginning, sublimates his own totality, his own cosmic horizons and his own personal miracle. These words are to a large extent Čemerski’s painterly credo, his philosophical and creative stance and aesthetics with which he identifies himself. In other words, “Very early on, Čemerski announced his crusade to the front lines of his generation. His personal investment was all his talent and his fanatical commitment to creating works with a clear personal mark, thus soon demonstrating the features of his personality and strong individuality.” Therefore it is not an exaggeration to say that from the very beginning his path has been specific, personal and practically outlined by himself, as it is characteristic of all great authors.

Opening up the Region

Speaking of Čemerski’s early days, that is, the path he chose in the period between 1961-1964/5, it must be emphasized that he escaped the ‘embrace’ of Informel, and the same can be said of the new trends in the painting of that period. More specifically, it is true that he observed and felt the new - the new realism, the new figuration and the like, but again, this was not his choice because he did not want/does not want to be like someone else, to belong here or there, to be classified, categorized…Since his early days he has insisted on personal expression, on leaving his own mark and on his own style of painting written with the capital initial letter! This is precisely the kind of magic that has captured since then not only the general public (the viewers) but also art historians, art critics, aestheticians, his colleagues and others. This is so because the painting of the young Gligor Čemerski even in his early days glided on, his personal sails pushed forward with strong winds, submerging itself in some kind of its own, amazingly new and magical (perhaps Postmodern) world, explored civilizations and cultures, blended in with nature and discovered - itself! And even then, this discovery was a painterly miracle because it was submerged in premonitions, passions, pulsation and intoxication that were, until then, unknown to us (to the Macedonian painting) as layers of images, feelings…Or, as Ćelić puts it in his Foreword to Čemerski’s first exhibition in Belgrade, this kind of painting is “of special taste and special intoxication if we can, at all, be intoxicated with fresh juice, the juice that cannot be squeezed from over-ripe and rotten fruit.” Until the emergence of the young Čemerski, Macedonian painting had not come across this new ‘type’ of sensitivity, such passion and mythical zeal and this kind of a completely new perspective of the world and understanding of painting. “In the early days of his career Čemerski embarked on a search for the traces that the Antique spirit had left on our soil: ancient Greek satyrs, the she-goat that nursed Zeus, Pan who was half-man, half-goat, Orpheus with the sound of his instrument who could bring stones to life, there is Icarus in his ecstatic and tragic flight. The action depicted in Čemerski’s paintings dating from those years are events and sights of a unique mythology which, in the concept of this artist, insists on the link between untamed nature and the mysteries which, through the reflection of this nature, reveal the presence of the divine powers in it.” Or, if you wish, they reveal the painter’s childhood days spent on the scorched slopes of the Tikveš region in and around Stobi, the echo of the dance of the satyrs and other mythological creatures processed through the artist’s imagination, the colour scheme soaked in by the child and the many layers of images from the Region / Nature. On several occasions Belgrade art critics identified the overall spirit in Čemerski’s paintings from this period with the pastoral resounding of “…some verse from Hesiod…” claiming that “the powerful forces of the earth, the plants and the people have been transposed in these paintings with an almost mythical force into a pastoral in which everything has been cleansed from the inside with a certain ancient, belated light.” And yet, although primarily imbued with Dionysian forces, the works dating from this period intrinsically possessed that uneasy existential anxiety, that pungent taste as well (S. Ćelić), those quivering traumatic forebodings…that later became even more dominant. In the beginning, his colour scheme is fairly restrained, sparse in a ‘cold’ and controlled manner, only to ‘melt’ later into a wide range of warm earth-coloured umber and ochre hues, red and yellow nuances…mightily orchestrated sections that seem impatient, as it were, to resound with a thunderous resonance. Čemerski’s early (anthological) works date from this period and spring from the sources described above; they include Self Portrait (1961); Shiva’s Strange Arrival (1961); Evil Landscapes (1961); Evil Landscapes (1963) and particularly Twilight Ring-Dance (1963/65); Little Icarus (1963) and other works should also be included in this period. Twilight Ring-Dance, a kind of underground Danse Macabre/Dance of Death even today appears incredibly modern and painfully tense and charged with energy. Moreover, it is astonishingly well developed in a masterful manner from a sketch/drawing not larger than 10 x 15 cm! Or Little Icarus, painted immediately after the catastrophic earthquake struck Skopje (as the majority of other works from this period), who is depicted so pathetically, capturing the moment when he still has not flown up in the skies, eternally diving down towards the earth (as the Icarus from 1967). Of course, other works from this period should be listed as well: Waking Up the Stone (1964); Panic (1965); Summer Game (1967); Icarus (1967) and others, since they contain many of the features that are to be developed in Čemerski’s later painting: Biblical invasion of strange insects, the embryonic Expressionist charge, ‘distortion’ of the form and the line, etc.

Painterly painting

In 1971, aged 31, and quite unusually for the circumstances characteristic of that time in Macedonia, Čemerski was commissioned to paint a fresco for the interior of Stopanska Banka in Skopje. In a few months, practically in one breath (at least it seemed so), he painted the fresco Warm Land on the surface covering approximately 40 square metres, a stunning merging of his pursuits in painting until then. It remains to this day one of the greatest achievements in the domain of visual arts in Macedonia. This is due to the fact that the fresco Warm Land should not be perceived exclusively as a work of art in the context of Gligor Čemerski’s output, but inevitably as an expression of the avant-garde spirit of the times and a creative effort to overcome the local, often provincial, appraisal of art. In April 1971, Čemerski was invited to participate in a competition announced by the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences (other participants who were invited included Borko Lazeski, Spase Kunoski, Rodoljub Anastasov, Dimitar Kondovski and Blagoja Nikolovski). The task of the artists was to offer a project for the artistic design of the wall in the Ceremonial Hall in the new building of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences and the subject matter proposed was From the Past and the Present of Macedonia. Čemerski submitted a finished work whose scale was 1:1, the monumental canvas entitled Macedonia with the dimensions 6 x 12.30 m. Due to a number of “objective and subjective” reasons, this competition was never formally finished; hence, this work had a somewhat “strange” fate. Nevertheless, his Macedonia found the place it was destined to have, and from a rolled-up canvas it spread, as if it had wings, into an epic at his exhibition held exactly on the premises of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 where it stands to this day! Macedonia, a monumental painting, is conceived as a triptych, consisting of Pillar of Suffering (left), Victory Day (centre) and Pillar of Resistance (right). Each part is a paraphrase of a particular segment from the historical ‘narrative’ of Macedonia. The once dark twilight ring-dance is elongated along a vertical of the centuries-long oppression, terror and suffering and the bones of the ancestors as a vow/reminder for the next generations; it also captures the moment of nationwide rebellion against tyranny, taking up arms as the only possible response to repression, the accentuated warm earth embodied in the central motifs of Victory, Freedom, the celebration of the New Day, the inevitable shawms and drums, the ring-dance once again, this time as a ritual and optimistic sign of togetherness, the Maenad, etc. Here, all those changes touched upon in Warm Earth are emphatically multiplied and transformed into a figurative and colouristic foundation for the Expressionist explosion in Čemerski’s work in the decades that followed. The intensity of feelings and energies literally circulate in/through this monumental canvas, echoing with the mighty sound of the shawms and twirl in the rhythm of the drums. The crescendo is sublimated in the figure of the Holy Mother of God Orant, woman/mother who is ‘cleansed’ on the level of an essential painterly symbol as she spreads her arms as wings. It is from her and through her that we see the outpouring of the symbols of fertility, femininity and abundance. At the same time, this work also anticipates the synthesis of elements from various forms of aesthetics that will later be profiled, with different intensity and extent of influence, such as that of Mexican muralists, Maya and Inca art, Art Brut, the sensitivity of El Greco, the fullness of Léger’s forms, the dramatic features of Picasso’s work…and, naturally, the art of Byzantium! Or, if you wish, it seems as if world painting has been created only for him and nobody else and he simply draws it into his story, into his painting, with incredible ease, making it feel Great. And today, the viewers are drawn into it in the same manner, standing unhindered in front of this Macedonian historical and aesthetic monument in the domain of painting. In terms of the drawing/line in this period, they are quite different in these two monumental works by Čemerski. They are, after all, as different as the concept from which they emerged. Namely, Warm Earth still, to a large extent, operates with the painterly logic of the ‘pastoral’, although characterized by evidently new Expressionist echoes and the hard, nervous line. In Macedonia, on the other hand, the drawing/line are different, they follow the ‘narrative’, they describe, they emphasize…they anticipate a completely new expressiveness in Gligor Čemerski’s creative output.

Byzantium revived

We have already referred on several occasions to Gligor Čemerski’s multi-faceted fascination of many years with the visual/pictorial and painterly features of Byzantium and Kurbinovo as its Macedonian pinnacle, a fascination that is, after all, only natural. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was guided by the experiences and lessons he had learned from the exceptional monumental projects and the evident immersing in his steady maturity as a painter; in the decades that followed, all this bloomed into neo-Byzantine refinement and convulsive Baroque-styled art, into concentrated energy and pathos and thriving mastery of the art of painting. The Angel from Kurbinovo will never be repeated in the same form: on the contrary, it will be multiplied in its Expressionist opposite “where all key elements are positioned with emphatic contrast and brought to a pronounced expressiveness, to convulsion, to turbulent brushstrokes, form and colour scheme. There is no gracefulness and elegance in them, no harmony or asceticism, that is, they are there again, but filtered through a different optics and sense. Hence, the prevailing feeling is that of their alteration: contractions and force, disharmony and Baroque-like features, pathos and rudimentary features…and yet, all of this breathes with a unified (heretic) spirituality.” The iconography or, as Gjuzel puts it, heraldry that is developed in Čemerski’s works that date from this period is, to put it mildly, strange, Biblically familiar in an unfamiliar way, often frightening… In an almost psychedelic and euphoric state of mind, through that “genuine explosion” as Stanić puts it, Čemerski’s expressiveness created practically in a single year the cycle Pathetic Iconostasis/Picture Wall. As a matter of fact, the beginnings of this cycle date from as early as the late 1970s, that is, a year or two before Kočani, somewhere along the route Paris-Sobra-Skopje. It was even then that the “miracle bringers” appeared and the already familiar hypertrophied insects and then, after Kočani, waiting in the wings, they pour out as “star-headed” images, “pathetic heads” and “large heads” which look as if they came down from Nerezi or Kurbinovo, grasshoppers, chameleons and other strange reptiles and jumping creatures of this earth (or are they?). And, as Vlada Urošević puts it, “in these paintings we see a continuation of that which has already been entitled in the work of this artist as the Twilight Ring-Dance - the dark dance swirls, through convulsions and passions, as a mixture of the earthly Dionysian ecstasy and Apollonian ascension towards light, of that which is of the body and that which is of the spirit, the battle for man between Eros and Thanatos.” From this moment onwards, Eros and Thanatos completely open up and their ambivalence begins to imbue as an essential Existential thought practically all of Čemerski’s future work; it will twirl and screech, all convulsed, from his every brushstroke. Their interplay, their passionate but self-destructive interplay will ruthlessly brand his every canvas in the years to come. This passion will prove to know no limits and restraints and will eventually be transformed into fierce clashes and only seeming reconciliation, only to begin once again the cycle of new hellishness. Perhaps at this point we should draw attention to another essential characteristic of Čemerski’s art, and that his attitude to Beauty or, if you wish, his promotion of exactly the opposite, the ugly as an aesthetic principle. It seems as if his each brushstroke is intertwined with Breton’s outcry “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all." Čemerski perceives reality exclusively through the prism of disharmony, tension, convulsion and whirlwinds…In his works, all forces extol precisely this “other side” of Beauty: order retreats in front of disorder, the straight steps back in front of the distorted, tranquility gives way to anxiety. Everything is in distress, in upheaval, out of joint…form is broken, the head is twisted, the eyes stare! The beautiful or, as Čemerski says himself, “the so-called realistic or illusionist European art” has no place in his works. His brush paints the world behind closed eyes!

St. George and the Dragon, and later

Čemerski’s St. George was ‘born’ in 1990/91 in Paris, on paper, in the shape of relatively small black and white drawings, as exceptionally suggestive, strongly expressive and dramatic depictions of the holy warrior slaying the dragon. The artist’s hand was in a nervous trance, it was unstoppable in its ‘ploughing’ of lines on the paper, it twisted them in syncopes, it built and dismantled. Here, all the subtlety and harmony, all the aristocratic exaltation of the Angel from the early 1980s leads to the opposite direction - to grotesque and caricature! The Dragon is (still) with one head, crocodile-like and blood-thirsty. And the destiny intended by the artist for the holy warrior is to defend the world and his own life unarmed, because his intention was to show that warriors of this caliber do not need weapons and that their holiness, beauty and spirituality suffice to vanquish evil. “Departing from the canon and leaving the holy warrior unarmed, Čemerski practically introduces a new variety of the model: the white horse and the holy horseman prevail in and of themselves by the very force of the Idea and the Spirit.” Thus, extracting it both from the collective memory and the old Christian apocryphal narratives, church walls and images in icons, in those hard times Čemerski offered to the world his own story about the saint and the dragon, the warrior and death, light and dark, good and evil! From this time to the present day the theme of St. George slaying the dragon has remained the central theme in Čemerski’s painting/drawing. In the coming years it varied in many ways, both in terms of iconography and iconology: the saint is shown without and with the spear, furious or composed; the dragon has gone through all kinds of many-headed transformations, occasionally resembling “a vaguely defined beastie;” at times, the focus is only on the horse and the dragon as in the series Kiss of Death; the conflict escalates to tumultuous, practically unrecognizable ‘embraces’; Čemerski’s St. George is often given additional attributes (St. George the Bringer of Wind, St. George of Ohrid, etc.); he is not always depicted with a halo, that is, the holy warrior occasionally resembles a young man from everyday life not so confident in his own superiority, and so forth. In addition, we are not always so sure about the final outcome of the battle! Or, as academician Madžunkov asks, “ Will St. George finally slay the dragon in Gligor Čemerski’s painting, will he eventually set us free from it?” In this period, too, and especially in the painterly rendition of this subject matter, as in the pathetic cycle of the 1980s, Čemerski’s voluptuous Expressionist nerve dominates once again. “He mainly expresses himself with the twisted and contorted coloured line with a frenetic vivaciousness that he introduces in the colour of his painted matter…The artist’s anxiety comes to the fore, his effort to tame the disharmony and give shape to the outstretched arabesque, the sign that functions with its sharp accords.” The surfaces are dynamized, often to the point of collision, the drawing is broken serpent-like along a straight line, the colourist eruption seems unstoppable…the artist’s hand wages merciless war with the paper, with the canvas…and with itself! And yet, on the other hand, the claim that these works actually exude some kind of strange balance also seems tenable, “[a sort of] tranquility achieved with great difficulty: a spiritual peace that comes from the awareness that the most genuine aspect of his output has not been expressed in the ‘answer’ to transient ‘tasks given by the times’ but in the passionate and incessant striving to search for the meaning of one’s own destiny and that of all humanity.” His discourse follows his Kurbinovo roots, as if reflected in a mirror and is transformed into a new Expressionism in order to tell the artist’s personal story, as well as that of the drama of our overall existence. Čemerski often says that we all have our own St. George and our own dragon. However, it seems as if his holy warrior contains our molecules, too, and as if he intends to wage war and sacrifice himself for the well-being of all of us! And yet, Mitko Madžunkov gives us a brighter interpretation of this narrative, according to which “the chthonic monster from the dark caves of one’s own subconscious - or the collective past - should not be killed, but tamed and transformed into our ally - that is the message of Čemerski’s cycle on St. George for the times to come!” Simultaneously with this cycle, in this period Čemerski was on several occasions preoccupied with the theme of Lamentation: the fresco illustrating this event can be seen in the Church of St. Panteleimon in Nerezi which dates from the 12th century. In fact, besides Kurbinovo, the fresco painting from this church is another important point of departure for Gligor Čemerski’s art, it is his entire painterly universe, almost an obsession…At the same time, we must bear in mind that the frescoes in this church are part of the world heritage and according to some scholars, the true beginning of the Proto-Renaissance. Therefore, Čemerski’s choice of his ‘teachers’ was not random: he dwelled on the mastery of the fresco painting in these two churches (naturally, not forgetting that of the churches of St. Sophia and St. Clement in Ohrid, those in Staro Nagoričane, Vodoča and others), referring to them as his own Louvre.

Final considerations

Gligor Čemerski is not a painter who follows a straight, conventional system. In fact, he is everything but conventional. Although, as he himself has often stressed, he paints what he feels and vibrates with the world and his own emotions, although he says that he is one of those who soak in the world around them through their senses and believes that he is attracted to his motifs in the same manner, yet it seems that there is something more to it. Čemerski explains the presence of this specific ingredient in the following way: “However, I force myself to leave these senses to repeat their observations, not at the very same moment, but at a time when the motif becomes slightly vague. For example, these trees - if I feel the urge to paint them in the light in which they now appear before us, I prefer to turn my head away in order to paint them when I have seemingly forgotten the precise appearance of things…I always say, the world is that which you see when you close your eyes. This world, the world behind closed eyes is that which obsesses me to this day.” It seems as if all the shadows of our todays and yesterdays pass through this “world” of his; they are both his and ours, local and global - as if the whole story of the Beautiful and the Ugly, of Good and Evil, of Eros and Thanatos passes through this world! And he has lived to tell the tale, outlived it, lived through it and…expressed it! Objectively speaking, Gligor Čemerski’s artistic oeuvre is unique and only one of its kind in the domain of the visual arts in Macedonia. Although it is decidedly Expressionist in its surface layer, his painting seems to “slip away” from the too narrow and typified determinants of the classical labelling in the field of visual arts as “Expressionism”/ “Surrealism” / “Symbolism”, etc. As a rule, artists of Čemerski’s rank and mastery are perceived more clearly outside the stereotypes and within a wider philosophical and cultural scope. And today, it is within such a wide context that we can freely put the accent on his painting as that of the forerunner of Postmodernism in Macedonia, and single out Čemerski himself as a painter who had carried in his genes the alphabet of Postmodernism many years before it emerged on the European scene. More specifically, Čemerski’s creative reflexes explore, examine, interpret and process the painterly experiences of magnificent epochs, great individuals and anonymous masters. As a matter of fact, on the one hand, this is his natural habitus: Antiquity, Stobi, satyrs, mythology…and his cultural heritage - the Macedonian variety of Byzantine fresco painting, Kurbinovo, the Church of St. Sophia; on the other hand, he never remained caught only in the national and traditional modes. On the contrary, he has quite openly sought for a dialogue with civilization in the widest sense of the term, which includes South American culture, El Greco and the Spanish masters, Delacroix, Picasso… If these Postmodern times insist on the thesis that the epochs of great projects are now gone, still such claims cannot fully convince us that the time of great artists is also gone! This is so since they are obviously here, among us, and it depends on us whether and how we will ‘recognize’ them. No trend in art, nothing “current” has succeeded, at least not until now, in annulling, ignoring or forgetting truly great art. Or, I could paraphrase the great Sir Kenneth Clark by saying that I can’t define in abstract terms yet what great art is, but I think I can recognize it when I see it. After all, whatever we write about Gligor Čemerski’s creative output - at any given time, today or tomorrow - it will not be the final word on it. As Stevan Stanić puts it, “it is at this point that the discussion on the paintings of this artist is yet to begin.” Or, perhaps we should conclude our discussion with the artist’s own words who has said that “the gymnastics of painting and guiding the touch and the gesture are one’s personal hunt, one’s own ritual choreography; it is a dance of love with a partner whose next move you can’t anticipate…This is the healing and blissful side of my craft. Someone who threatens the void with such blind passion, who fights it with a sword and wages war with it, certainly can’t be really wise, but I am sure that they can’t be completely hopeless either.” And this is surely true!

(Translated from Macedonian: Rajna Koshka)