ABOUT CREATIVE WORK

In his works Nesic found the real relationship between the content and form, finding his own recognizable handwriting which he excitingly witnesses about the complex reality and historical moment in which he lives.

Andrej Tisma
multimedial artist
21.3.1995. Novi Sad

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The paintings from "A Hunter's Oasis" cycle, on the contrary, play an important part in his work, testifying clearly to the seriousness of his dedication to the very essence of painting this abstract cycle belongs to the abstract informel, with an obviously strong intention to construct a wider and deeper space, and to furnish the same with the elements of gesture and movement, within the consequences of his fight with the surface, with the consequence of an extential relationship between an artist and his object. The clash of material and philosophic is reflected in every layer, in every driblet of colour - he wants his work to reflect his own philosophy, his view of the world. Provided a through look in Dragan Nesic's works is taken, one is bound to discover a modern perspective of the world, a philosophy and practice giving the profile of Homo Multiplex, a contemporary artist who will not know of any unattainable boundaries of our times.

Slavko Timotijevic
Art historian
Belgrade 1995.

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Nesic colour - paints, colour - thinks, colour - creates a pure idea, which is not to be defined as a thematic one, rather as a national, mystic and wonderful space. His paintings are, in fact, a spatial philosophy, a newly created space, all of expressive, authentic, meaningful and essential tissue, substantial clearcut, with the movement of colour masses being easily transformed into colorful art visions.

In some paintings this moving colour exercises such a strength which instantly grabs you, ties you, and you feel the painting with all your senses. Painting, of course, serves the most valuable sense, which Nesic, being an artist, knows feels and respects.

Milan Coko Marovic
art historian

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Fantasy is Illusion

Only privileged and dedicated have right to reduce an image revealing landscape, spirit, scent of spring or pain in chest, to a brush sweep.

Initially he believed his paintings were only miniature fragments of a fantastic mosaic that would eventually depict his life. Then, suddenly, he realized that each of these fragments housed a whole universe and that fantasy was a mere illusion.

On 31st of October 1960, in Buenos Aires, Borges wrote a story, and it is still Dragan Nesic's obsession. As short as life: "a man decides to draw the world. He spends his life time drawing countries, kingdoms, bays, ships, islands, fish, houses, instruments, stars, horses and people into the canvas. At his death-bed he sees his own image in patiently drawn labyrinth of lines."

He is also fascinated by the blind artist's technique and he has accepted it as a way of painting expressions. Borges would develop novels in his mind, then retell and finally reduce them to short tales on paper. The art of essence deducing is a gift, forever challenged by metaphysics. Reducing a novel to sentence or realistic images to brush sweep (revealing landscape, a spirit, scent of spring or pain in chest), indisputably does belong to the caste of privileged pundits who never hesitate to sacrifice their lives to art.

He has taken short excursions to collage performance and mail-art. He used to return tired but happy. Then he would paint his memories.

Holding a degree in physics from the faculty of science, he, therefore, holds the forces of macrocosm and microcosm hi palm, as donor does the symbol of pious and of endowment.

Rarely speaks of himself.

A catalogue has it that he has exhibited in Belgrade, Cacak, Uzice, Osjek, Gorazde, Priboj, Pljevlja, Gornji Milanovac, Pizza, Milan, Shelton Stoke, and that his paintings have traveled, ( on their own, without their sire) to all continents.

He lives and paints in Priboj.

Milos Lazic
Beograd, 3.4.'99

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Dragan Nesic, a multimedia artist of a world class is (widely) known artist in the second half of the 20 th century. At the dawn of the new millennium, when the skeptics think that everything has been seen and sent to the garbage of history in a virtual labyrinth where there are no Thesius and no Minotaur, he, as a master of collages with a triple smile defeats with the power of his creativity the spirals discovering visual wealth, for spite.

Dusan Djokic
Artist and a art critic
Eminent member of ULUS,
ULUPUDS and AICA

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I am different from myself

Only Lord is said to appear in more shapes and in more various manners than art does in its rich and colourful history. But the paradoxes of artistic forms, ways of existence and presentation only start in this, never to end, and they are equally large even when we talk that the very content of the artistic work is a word - there is nothing that could not become the artistic content. In that perennial changeableness, though, the art and the artistic process have never been so incomprehensible as it is the case with the modern art. Its main characteristic today is to exist in such a big number of artistic forms and efforts that in a century behind us we lost the picture of a whole. Those things that during the twentieth century were made, marked as, or claimed to be the art, perhaps overcome the variety of the former art history.

This introduction about thinking of artistic works of many contemporary creators is fit for the variety of works of Dragan Nesic. The exhibition of paintings and drawings, for which purpose I am writing these few words for this catalogue, represents only one possible cut through the large opus of the noticeable contemporary creator who works and lives in Priboj. The other choices would represent different moments of creative imagination which connect concepts and crafts, movements of the hand and mind, softness and sharpness, which are born without some previously determined plan, so that only looked at backwards they speak about the crucial fight the artist is leading with himself, and all of us. That fight with himself, and for his expression, which is the characteristic of every accustomed and determined creator, may be the impression which can only frame and connect the different artistic phases of Dragan Nesic.

There is no doubt that paintings and artistically adapted objects, installations and occupations of the moment for the sake of the esthetic act, that drawings and the colour dynamics, their appearing, strengthening and vanishing, until they get to the burned black colour, only mean the artistic dance where something is born and dies. Is it the sign of Nesic's triumph over himself or the defeat of the art, or vice versa, defeat over himself and the triumph of the art? To these difficult questions, which praise and hurt the things they are talking about, there are no direct answers, but the writer of these lines sees the counterweight of the hardships, which are marked by the constant changes and the search, in the cheerfulness and dynamic of the creator. All the great art is in defeats, so Nesic's defeat would like to find the place for his work in this unstoppable time and disaster. Those people who know him better and follow his work can patiently describe the proportion of this inner dialectics, but its efficiency is seen in the works presented in this exhibition.

Therefore, the observer is given the right to see in a privileged moment at one place the encounter of the directions of development and the traces of the road that is passed, and to choose what he likes among them, while the artist has to enlarge that difference within himself, until the final result of one artistic and vital effort is reached.

Aleksandar Jerkov

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ON THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION OF DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS OF DRAGAN NESIC IN IVANJICA

Dragan Nesic managed to unlock a door of a dungeon using lines and blots and finally liberate those non-imagined forms. You can recognize them in stains, cracks or shadows on the walls, pavements, old facades. Almost all of us see some different shapes in them, but we lack courage or even do not attach sufficient importance to revive them, retell them or shape them in a painting. Nesic did it - he revived the mystical characters!

Leonardo talked a lot about different creatures and apparitions which observe him from the cracks and stains during the lonely hours. He considered those associative characters as an everlasting source of creative energy. Thus Nesic projects his artistic world in nice watercolour, prosaic stains. Metamorphic beings are born surprised by the mutual encounters. Connections of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic provoke the observers, and the mild irony can be recognized in their eyes. The power of metamorphosis has been used in a masterly manner. The Antic Greeks did not use it in vain to punish the characters of their myths and legends. They believed that metamorphosis is worse punishment from death, because the being is used to certain shape and forced to move into something strange.

Grotesque, mystic beings on Nesic's paintings provoke, tease the observer through their unusual, often astonishing phalusoid shapes. It seems that they have known forever the secret we, the usual mortals, will never know.

The author supported his amorphous, oniric beings, with the free horizontal and vertical lines in the background. He crowned all of it fairy tale colours and successfully veiled them in optimism.

Milica Raicevic
Academic painter

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Text for the catalogue of the individual exhibition of Dragan Nešić in Happy Gallery of SKC

Whenever I think of Dragan Nesic, somehow spontaneously, with the thought of him start swarming my favourite characters: Cyrano de Bergerac, Silver flyer, Bruce Lee and other fighters for honour and dignity of the weak and the oppressed, opponents of the vain tyrants creators of the most negative activities where there is no place for love, loyalty, compassion.

He manages in 24 hours to be a successful and respected Grammar school teacher, artist in a humble atelier, passionate basketball lover and occasional coach, good father and a husband. The crown to everything is the expert running of the professionally organized gallery "Spiral" in Priboj, an important place for gathering important Serbian, foreign artists and artists from all over our ex-homeland. He is the source of good and useful information which he generously shares with his friends, in short, he serves to the VIRTUE.

In his atelier-tower, Dragan portrays his inner states making densely weaved scenes from which bodies and heads of people come to the surface. He voluntarily leaves himself to the unconscious meanings of his human experiences. His work is very close to children's creativity, ironic and destructive meanings permeated with insecurity and fear.

How to reconcile his cheerfulness in life and these silent expressions which without a single move observe us from the paper? Is that his shaded side so many times described in literature, the theme abundantly used in comics, films and theatre? It seems that he is all of that together, the being whose emittance contributes to the optimistic view of the process we call life.

Prof. Nikola Vukosavljević
Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts

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Recycled and transformed reality

Having been in use for a hundred years the technique of using collage paper is definitely one of the most popular ones, and without any doubt, the most widespread technique in the contemporary art nowadays. Since it was a Cuban invention (sticky papers) it was primarily promoted and popularized by Braque and Picasso. Afterwards it was transferred from spatial- plastic figuration to a new type of fragments and typographic elements setting - which enhanced its optical effect - the evolution was started by the work of Italian futurists, then it became a part of Russian avant-garde with the help of Vladimir Tatlin, and, after that, DADAists accepted it whole-heartedly and mostly promoted it through poster settings (Haussmann, Huelsenbeck, Hannah Höch, George Grosz...) made using recycling and resetting of press cuttings, photos, postcards and various discarded materials.

But, perhaps Merz- collages by Kurt Schwitters - the father of German DADA and the creator of Merz movement - what has been remembered as a search for complete work of art, especially famous Merz - bau building made out of  varied civilization waste, discarded and accidentally found things.

The abovementioned is succeeded by the work of surrealists with photomontage and  text montage, then Bauhaus with constructive collage, and before that Marcel Duchamp and readymade creation, then collages of Francis Picabia and Max Ernst, then, again DADAists and surrealists... afterwards, as far as the twentieth century and the past millennium is concerned, the evolution continued with the material painting (made out of sand, plaster and mortar, performed by Joan Miró and Willi Beumeister) and digital art; so the computer interfered with the story of virtual reality and tremendously contributed to evolution of collage to, up to then, unimaginable boundaries.

Fortunately, the evolution is still ongoing and Dragan Nešić is an important part of this creative area. His collages, without exception, are an example of personal evolution and improvement, and some important art historians and critics talk about them in a very persuasive manner. For example, Dejan Đorić notes "Tiny, but crucial interventions of Dragan Nešić  on collages are made, using the method of organic forms application (bird's feather, seed and other things) onto the body of collage, by which he dignifies the cold concept of collage and focuses on tactile dimension".

Being a person who follows the work of Dragan Nešić, especially his hyper production of collages, and being someone who deals with collages personally, I dare say that I notice constant improvement, but not through the evolution of forms and techniques Nešić uses -although, that is also obvious- but through constantly new and fresh contents, recycled, transformed and recreated realities, made by productive mental nurturing. Collages show picturesque thoughts, allegories, sometimes even cynicism, they make pointless the epiphenomenon of the civilization mass media machinery in which the voice of an individual is written-off, even the problems of transmutation and genetic engineering, transgenic freedom of the New Age.   All of this, actually faded from the mental cavity of Nešić  and, instead of conforming  to the so-called imperatives of time and space in which we endure, he transformed it into mocking of such time and space. I would say, he has a point.

But there are collages dedicated to art and artists, heroes of the past, such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Ray Johnson  and others, as well as collages dedicated to events and people who had a tremendous effect on shaping our thoughts, even feelings towards the World, and towards our own nation.

In a famous Nešić's collage - if we decide to analyze only one work from his vast and diverse opus - dedicated to Joseph Beuys, Fluxus artist, one of the most prominent representatives of the action art, we notice in the upper left corner a small photo of Marcel Duchamp, who, as you already know, has influenced the extension of understanding of the art itself, and those who are good at reading  artistic texts and author's messages will realize what kind of relationship we are dealing with here.

Things are a bit different when it comes to Nešić's engagement in many mail-projects, which are mostly thematically oriented, in which Dragan Nešić, as well as all the other artists, sticks to the topic, and he subordinates his  skills in making collages to the topic which is set in the project, but even then , as in his paintings and drawings,  recognizable differentiation of materials, colour, structure, then gesture and  tactility, become prominent.

Of course, even in signalistic movement-through signalistic projects - Nešić tends to preserve the peculiarities of his artistic language, and even to go beyond in the connection of literature and fine arts...and their permeating in a new way, when a collage actually becomes a visual poetry and extended artistic medium.

We, undoubtedly, have a gifted and persistent artist whose collages will tell the true and interesting stories using craft which cannot be found everyday among us.

Dobrica Kamperelić

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