About the Artist

From the exhibition catalogue — Matica Crnogorska, Cetinje 2025

Listening to Silence

And first, in the beginning, there was drawing — the most common definition of this painterly technique, the essence of all visual expression, from which thought and ideas developed into the most elevated spiritual achievement of civilisation — artistic creation.

The discourse on the exhibition of paintings-drawings by independent artist Vesko Vujić at Matica Crnogorska in Cetinje opened with the words of masters of drawing — Dado Đurić, who says: “Drawing is my writing, my confession, it is my speech, my mode of communication, my most sincere dialogue with the world and my deepest, most essential artistic expression”; Uroš Tošković: “My philosophy emerges through drawing. It is my way of thinking”; and Dragan Karadžić: “Drawing is the creative spark and echo, a reflection of personal ideas, confessions, feelings, and the immediacy of one’s own self.”

In this context, I would highlight the view of Zoran Todović, who considers that “Drawing… is an infinite underground river that along its course is sometimes visible, sometimes not. The visible lines everyone sees; the invisible — only the initiated”¹ — a view that points us toward one possible approach to the painterly work of Vesko Vujić.

Vujić’s visual world is a world of silence that gives meaning to the mental, introverted projections of his inner being — one inclined to the conciseness of human wisdom through which, with few “words,” absolute truths are expressed. What makes it distinctive is an abstracted incompleteness, reduced to an associative form that has its own life and its own meaning within the framework of the artist’s real and surreal fantasies through which he traces the movement of thought and highlights the qualities of beings and objects. This is, above all, an autonomous and unique visual vocabulary that rests on principles of perceptual ambiguity and premonition.

Vujić deals a priori with the problematics of whiteness, which he attempts to “master” through minimalist interventions of linear contours that form the core of his artistic expression. In fact, these works show reminiscences of prehistoric and children’s drawings elevated to the level of high artistic value, as well as analogies with the painterly work of renowned Montenegrin artist Cvetko Lainović in creative approach — but not in visual poetics, which in Vujić amplifies the lyrical, intimist note.

Through sketch-like drawing, Vujić defines form as forma prima — reduced to essential primordality, through which he materialises his ideas, thoughts, feelings… His drawings contain no strict straight lines. They are free, melodic, trembling like the chords of distant music that bounces and flows into the background. Yet they are simultaneously sharp and rough. Thus the black line cuts across the surface of the painting covered by layered applications of white — on a substrate of hardboard or canvas — achieving relief with gentle shadings of grey reflections, or polished surfaces on which he lightly inscribes and shapes forms that exist in the “void” of space as two-dimensional entities. The line “flies around” form to reveal and encompass its essence. The neutral white background, into which all colours of the spectrum have merged, becomes an open field of visual and linguistic ambiguity, while the vitalist line — unfinished, interrupted, and solitary — describes real objects: human figures, portraits and self-portraits, naked human bodies with accentuated extremities that are sometimes the sole motifs in the paintings. Human forms, aesthetically refined or caricatured, solitary or in pairs, are presented in the format of figure, half-figure, or defined solely by extremities. Vujić, in effect, revives something unique from “nothingness” — achieving, with a few lines, the effects of the psychological profile of characters: states of spiritual peace, love, sorrow, bliss. He follows, above all, the language of the body, the virtual tactility of bodily contours and their volumetric quality, while at the extremities — the feet — he accentuates bodily deformation.

In certain works, he situates figures within their immediate surroundings through window frames, electric poles, fences… The object layer of the painting, beyond the function of its compositional subjectivity, also carries symbolic (barbed wire) and metaphorical meaning: interior — room, and exterior — a bare tree bending in the wind, as two antipodes symbolising two aspects of life — the warmth of home and the inclemency of natural phenomena as the alter ego of human unrest.

Following the freedom of his visual explorations, Vujić does not limit himself to situations that characterise the real world, but extends the field of action to surreal fantasies. Thus into the hair of a female portrait he places a fish, birds and a cross, framing the female portrait like a halo, while undefined forms and lines, independent of form, accompany the artist’s abstracted compositional reflections. In effect, the artist animates our sensory perceptions through details that reveal the secrets of his hermetic world — one directed toward the elimination of the literal and the emphasis of the elemental.

The exhibition of paintings-drawings by Vesko Vujić at Matica Crnogorska in Cetinje — an artist who, after many decades, presented himself to the cultural public of Cetinje and Montenegro — reveals a master of drawing who, in an atmosphere of solitude and infinity, in the immeasurable whiteness of the universe, opened before us his intimate spaces woven from shadows and illusions.

¹ Art Gallery Haos – Collection, Belgrade 2015, p. 125.