Vladimir Veličković

While looking at Vladimir Veličković’s paintings, nobody gets the idea to smell or taste them. Someone will feel the smell of oil, turpentine, varnish, other accompanying scents… But if we enter the painting, if we find ourselves in the Veličković-esque space? What kind of scents will challenge our senses of smell and taste?

But, let’s approach the painting through the so-called low senses…

Veličković’s grammar is known to us: ravens, wire fences in the midst of geographical void, gallows, sometimes scaffoldings needed for hanging a man: pink focuses, blazing flames and dense masses of smoke, immense, waste areas, sand, expanses of the burnt-up, destroyed earth, a headless corpse; elsewhere, on a different canvas, a headless body, rats running away, headless dogs, a man’s body falling into the void… When we get out of the canvas, we are still haunted by its scents…

We try to escape the tyranny of odours, infections, the dank, but their presence does not leave us: we hear the sound of a bird’s beak digging in search for a worm, probably saturated with human flesh; the distant crackling of fire; the creaking of a gallows; the silent scream of a beheaded; clinking sound of the nails of rats that flee from people, with a trace of blood on their moustaches; the breath that flesh emits while falling through emptiness to meet its metaphysical fate; or a hanging corpse, swung by a gentle breeze from the Balkans, Arab desert or other place in which the eternal return of the instinct of death now brings the consequences that make history…

To whoever feels, hears the painting of Vladimir Veličković in this way, the scene will tell something else, something different. Afterwards, they will see his metaphysical paintings in a different way. The silence of painting – his painting – must not prevent us from asking the whole body to participate in the celebration that the artist offers. Although this celebration takes place on the edge of the abyss. People dig their tombs, the painter only illuminates them.
Michel Onfray

Vladimir Veličković exhibited for the first time in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1951. In 1960 he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. His first solo exhibition was hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1965, he won the Prix de la Biennale de Paris. He moved to Paris the following year, and still lives and works there. Veličković had his first solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie du Dragon in 1967. In 1983 he was appointed as a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, a position he held for 18 years. In 2009 he established a fund to support young Serbian artists, the “Vladimir Veličković” Fund for drawing. Veličković holds the following honorary titles: Member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts; Member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France. Member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; Knight of the Legion d’Honneur.