Mane Sakic “Blue Blood Shark”

Van Der Plas Gallery

This event has ended.

The last act of the twentieth century’s many horrific conflagrations deeply scarred every resident of Belgrade, but few witnesses have been as able to harness its explosive energy and reveal its underlying seeds of regeneration as has Mane Sakic.

Mane Sakic reaches back much further than his own war-torn experience, centuries and millennia back to the turbulent and violent creative/destructive forces of the subconscious realm, our Collective Memory. More than seeing this energy simply depicted as paint on his large canvases, we feel it deeply inside, coming from our own memory. We feel our own connection with the no-longer-distant past, from poets and heroes of the ancient world — Greece, Rome and especially Byzantium. This source of energy from the past joins with the torrent of personal lived experience — the continuum of painting into the present moment.

Artists have long made use of a little-understood method of creation where the best part of a work-in-progress must be destroyed in order to allow for the birth of something new and unprecedented. Mane Sakic took this method to its extreme when he collaborated with another artist to destroy at night what he himself had created during the day. The resulting work could not have been realized without the nighttime ruination.

In many parts of the world, including the Slavic states, poetry is held in much higher esteem by its citizens than it is here in the US. Mane Sakic aims for poetry to act as our guide through his paintings, so that, in experiencing his work, we are mindful of the tempestuous past that is a part of us all. In his move to New York, Mane Sakic was able to establish a necessary distance from the past that threatened to consume him, and devote himself to bringing to life this poetry of the present.

—Thomas Cox