Sretko Divljan – “50 years of divljanism”

Sretko Divljan was considered a controversial figure in the cultural life of Jagodina. As someone who could not stand being average and stereotyped, he tried to make his work recognizable, with an author’s stamp, unique and rich. He belongs to the generation of artists who learned artistic skills from Miodrag Rogić, Stojan Ćelić, Boško Karanović, prominent professors of the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts, and he often humorously says that his teachers were also Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Leonardo da Vinci.

At the beginning of Divljan’s artistic work, one can notice the strong influence of Miodrag Rogić, from whom he adopted, above all, the tendency to expose and demystify objects, nature and art itself, in order to get to their pure artistic essence, as well as the fact that he never succumbed to trends. By further developing his visual language, Divljan created an authentic visual aesthetic that he, playing with words, called “divljanism”. In this way, he not only plays with his last name and provokes his surroundings a little with his own style, but also delves into the history of art with a reminiscence of Fauvism, a group of French artists of the “wild beasts” (French: les fauves) who represented the first artistic revolution of the 20th century, as well as the New Fauves of neo-expressionism.

At the heart of divljanism is drawing, or rather, a line, behind which lies an extraordinary drawing talent, so we could call Divljan the “master of the line”. The line is accompanied by striking color, and he explains the presence of intense color in his paintings in the following way: “I color life with bright colors, because that is how I see it and live it… I give meaning to life with colors.”

The inner expressive urge drives him to paint strongly, so large formats are precisely what allows him to express himself adequately. However, no matter how much it may seem that his paintings are the product of a momentary expression that finds its embodiment on the canvas at the moment of painting, there is nothing arbitrary or random in his work. Divljan creates a picture by adhering to the valid artistic canons and viewing painting as “mathematics in color.” Every line is thought out, the composition is skillful, lively and dynamic, and the color is precisely determined and balanced.

In addition to the emphasized linearity, intense color and the absence of any improvisation, divljanism has another characteristic feature, which is that with each new cycle the artist presents himself in a new light. In other words, Divljan’s divljanism is unique and unrepeatable. Moving within the framework of an already formed visual language, in one phase of his work Divljan emphasizes the line and geometrizes the form, while the color is less resonant, and the emotion is elegiac. The next time, vivid colors dominate, the line is gentler, more elegant. Elegiacity has been replaced by lyricism and serenity.

In Divljan’s paintings, human beings, birds, domestic and wild animals live in symbiosis. The inevitable bull that came to this world from the cave of Altamira or the palaces of Crete. The goat that Chagall also painted, but Rauschenberg also soared to the stars. Dogs that are sometimes dangerous and furious, sometimes cuddly. Donkeys, rams, goats, but also a tiger and a puma with astonished looks. A special place in this wonderful world is occupied by birds that observe everything that happens. Sometimes they proudly pose, ornate and colorful, alone or in a group, and often accompany human figures, especially female ones. All of them are given a symbolic interpretation in Divljani’s paintings or function as personified representations. As for the human figure, a constant motif in Divljan’s paintings is the female figure, often presented as a nude. These beauties, which originate from the beautiful women of Knossos and ancient Egypt, Modigliani’s elegant and melancholic ladies and Picasso’s female figures, were nevertheless created by Divljan’s hand and represent, above all, the embodiment of beauty and the feminine principle. Female nudes vary from graceful figures, distant and untouchable, to fatal and sensual seductresses. Occasionally, Divljan introduces portraits of his friends, relatives, famous artists or ordinary people he has met in his life into his world of lines and painted surfaces.

As an artist, Divljan is in constant search for beauty, and as a person he likes to observe the world around him, to laugh at some phenomena he notices, and sometimes to be inclined to satire. He then communicates his subjective experiences of what he sees and his inner visions through visual language.

Expressive, based on pure visual language, at times wild, then again gentle, on the border between drawing and painting, the painting of Sretko Divljan not only represents a unique phenomenon on the Jagodina art scene, but, having received full affirmation from art criticism, has also found a prominent place in contemporary Serbian visual art.