Ljubica Miljković
“Painting is a great joy for me. I wanted all my paintings to be part of the grand and sumptuous canvas of life.” (ZoranTešanović)
The succinct artist’s words, which we have chosen as the motto of this text, say a lot and direct us towards the poetic and aesthetic efforts of Zoran Tešanović. He did not give up on his beliefs, and therefore his opus logically and consistently evolves. Artistic works as unfinished symbols allow, even require the ever different view in the context of time and observer. We hope that our perception and this interpretation of the artist and his creative work will be encouraging for future researchers of Serbian art as an integral and inevitable part of the world art that our visual art enriches considerably with its ascents.
Tešanović is an artist with a clear attitude about art and life. Therefore it is not surprising that in the peacefulness of his studio in Sečanj, “surrounded by love and goodness” – as he himself states, despite the turmoil in the world, he has found his own artistic truth and avoided the traps of the generally accepted pamphlet “contemporary art practices” based on the naive understanding of existence, history, politics…
Tešanović is extremely educated and informed about the most important social and artistic events in our country and abroad. This did not lead him the wrong way or to provincial repetition already reached in world centers, but rather to the need to express himself and penetrate the essence of creation and being. In this respect, we could compare him with Sava Šumanović, who, during his solitude in Šid, reached the peaks with his monumental cycle the Šid women. By changing the same model and his closest environment, the master from Šid created surreally-metaphysical compositions, even stepped into abstraction the way he understood it himself. According to him, Raphael moved from the abstract and ended up in the real, while Ingres did the opposite. For him, abstraction is not exclusively the absence of figures and objects, but the attitude towards them and the plastic material that needs to reflect not only the skill of the hand, but also of the spirit, thoughts, emotions… Starting from the seemingly real, Tešanović also arrives at a kind of abstraction; an abstraction that implies thought operation in the process of understanding the objective world, in which, for the purpose of emphasizing the important, all the irrelevant properties and relationships are separated and omitted. Good artists aim to create an autonomous nature, rather than repeat the one which they started from.
With his portraits, figures and objects, the master from Sečanj boldly goes to the same points of endlessness. He moves away from the real and enters the imagined, oneiric, memorized. The early works of Tešanović belong to the forms of surrealism and fantasy, but we could say that he is also Raphael and Ingres. Tešanović turns real into the unreal and vice versa and reaches the aesthetics of the too unreal, the unreal, which originates in the real, art and life, harmony as the balance of contrast. With his extraordinary sensibility, he is tied to his time, although he, like Šumanović, came to a kind of The way I know and can style. He searched for and found himself. It is clear that this can only be done by the most powerful, most curious and most gifted.
Professor Radomir Reljić, who even at the time of prevalent abstraction and painting as a coloured field did not give up on presenting people and became one of promoters and main representatives of the neo-figurative art in our country, played an important part in the artistic formation of Zoran Tešanović. Unlike the professor who was interested in an ever-changing and different interpretation of the truth about man and historical, religious, geopolitical assumptions and events, Tešanović opted for another world, away from the daily politics that art can not even influence. Tešanović is aware that everyone has to find their own way, which he confirms by the statement on the necessity of the disappearance of influence, and the survival of congeniality. That is why he quickly found himself and attracted attention with his unrealistically real rebuses with a variety of generally accepted and hermetic symbols and signs.
Although Tešanović finds iconographic content important, plastic material to which he pays the greatest attention is undoubtedly the most important to him. Even in his first works he focused on painting wide calm surfaces, as well as details. Thus, he enriched the reduction of the form by the flickering of the small moves and the beauty of matter. And he even gave a metaphysical dimension to his early poetical realistic portraits, at times a bit more expressive. He proved himself to be a great painter and that he truly deserved Rista and Beta Vukanović award.
At the end of the ninth decade and during the next one, Tešanović used a special colourist neoclassicism. His impeccable drawing became more precise, his shortening more skillful, the point of observation different, always in the function of the artistic and conceptual whole. During the tenth decade of the 20th century, he built compositionс from contrasts – colouristic and meaningful. The collisions of red, green, blue, yellow, white, black, then calm monolithic painted planes and arabesque-filled fields, the confrontation of the beauty and the beast, mermaids and pirates, the good and the evil, the earthly and that unreachable cosmic… It is all merged into a surreal and timeless order of the stopped metaphysical moment into which an equally important act of a long-lasting creative process flowed. Tešanović opposed the cruelty of civilization progress to the hint of goodness, truth, justice and beauty, respite and break. Perhaps that is why he multiplies the same motive and, most often, works in series.
Tešanović supports a highly cultivated manner of expression. Except in the expansion of chromatics, he enjoys black on black, as well as gradations in colour value, light, noble materialization, anatomically accurate and, sometimes, expressionistically freely defined forms, meticulous details and simplification. In some cases, he suggests hills, objects, and phenomena using a single expressive line. With stylization and reduction he searches for the perfect sign. That is why he dematerializes seemingly real forms in order to become symbols and initiate thinking. With a powerful visual impression he attracts attention and directs to revealing the value of the painting.Over time, the artist Zoran Tešanović reduced his complex compositions to knowingly selected details of multilayered and ambiguous meanings and actions.
His latest achievements have the same power. Tešanović focused on the essence of narration, the meaning of drawings, forms, colours… Using minimal means he achieves maximum expression. He has opted for seemingly easier, but basically much more difficult challenges. “The molecules of brighter future,” as he affectionately refers to his paintings, are sarcastic unity of opposites – a blend of monumental pop-art can with fish as, among other things, a symbol of fertility and life. He achieves the same effect of combining the incompatible through a collision of the beauty of painting and industrial frameworks that enhance the sarcasm and absurdity of the scene. Tešanović sometimes skillfully uses a coloured kitsch frame as an antithesis of the noble pictorialness. He also devotes himself to the picture with a hinted plot that gets lost in the cosmic space of the whole. Equally successfully he uses simple planes and accumulated linear structures, knowledgeable modeling and “naivist” accents.
Although he gives an ironic tone to everything, he is a very serious and conscientious artist who reveals art in life the same way he finds life in art. He points out that “remained faithful to the mystery and magic of human hand”, because only it “can spiritualize and credibly convey the artist’s idea.” We believe that for him art is magic as well, which allows him to, as a painter of from Marguerite Yourcenar, jump into a boat which he has painted and save himself from the emperor’s, i.e. earthly and inhuman envy. Tešanović’s faith in life and art is the basic quality of life and art. That is why what he creates has a great significance for Serbian and general human art.
