Aria Art Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition SPECULUM by Miloš Todorović, which will take place in the Florentine venue from Saturday 1st of May to 22nd of June 2021, in collaboration with Drina Gallery and Logic Art Space.
Stimulated by the period of residence in the empty and silence Renaissance city of Florence, the Serbo-French artist searches for ways of devising the portrait to the point where he eliminates all that seems superfluous to him. He leaves only a glance on the canvas – a portrait on a mirroring background presented through only one life-sized EYE. His pictorial process is reversed, forms are created through light rather than shadow, where a single subject, the eye, follows the viewer, creating a feeling of the invisible presence of mutual gazes. Faces of lives lived can be seen and imagined through the sharp brushstrokes that outline floating eyes. These individuals, immersed in different shades of blue, represent a cultural heritage that blends with contemporary expressive minimalism.
Each image carries a secret, something mysterious and unfathomable that may not be labeled or fully explained, hidden beneath the mist, between the terrestrial and sublime.
Energy vibrations pulse in strong rhythm, going beyond the boundary of the visual, indulging in the power of silence and the intensity of emptiness.
The emotive scheme is further amplified by the 3D audio installation by Augustine Leudar.
The sixteenth-century garden offers another challenge to Milos, a site-specific intervention that should represent the history of the place where he exhibits.
After an introspective and silent period, in which Miloš retired for several years from the art market, he came back to Belgrade where he presented a solo show Apocalypse Insight (22/02/2020 Drina Gallery) – the first solo exhibition in his hometown after 27 years since, at the invitation of academician Vladimir Veličković, he went to Paris to study. A few months later, he arrived in Florence where he completed his first solo exhibition in Italy, Speculum at the Aria Art Gallery.
Speculum series develops ideas and topics manifested by the urge for the visible and (in)tangible, abstract and figurative at the same time - and is a direct continuation of his previous cycle of paintings – Apocalypse Insight – which from today’s point of view, seems to be a premonition of the events which have occurred on a global scale.
Miloš Todorović (Belgrade, 1971) studied at ’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he obtained a master degree in painting in 1999.
He is the laureate of some of the greatest professional awards in France in the field of painting, such as the prize for painting awarded by the French Academy of Sciences and Arts from the Pierre Cardin Fund.
So far, he has shown his artworks in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his paintings have been exhibited along with artworks by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jean Michel Basquiat, Erro, Combas, Damien Hirst, Mel Ramos, Jannis Kounellis, Douglas Gordon etc.
More than a thousand of his artworks have become part of international public and private collections today such as the Frissiras Museum / Athens, Pierre Cardin Foundation / Paris, Zepter Collection / Monte Carlo, Bachelot Collection / Paris, James Lubowitz Collection / Taos, New Mexico etc.
Looks and poems
Present and past are constantly connected, as are our sensory spheres, such as instinct and reason, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Milos represents its central motifs characterized by flickering dimensions, permeable shapes and ineffable contours, synergies that result in an inclination towards the brightness and colour of organic matter. A lesson that starts from afar, from tensions and torments by Rembrandt to reach Soutine and Bacon. It is the matter that breaks down, not the shapes according to the geometries. Reading these paintings forces us to an introspective journey, thanks to which we can reach the real datum. A journey in which materials and elusive colours are seen, pains and emotions are perceived, not without hearing deep echoes populated by ghosts. The formal constructions are not intended to illustrate the visible, but to arrive at reality through clues, dreams, as in Baudelaire’s forests of symbols. There is never stasis, it is a continuous motion, an eternal journey, with always different destinations. There is no hermeticism to be deciphered, but a truth to be conquered, and Miloš Todorović is here to give us the tools for our conquest.
Francesco Moretti
I had been painting for about ten years and since I was a child I developed a spontaneous love for ancient painting, but I began my intense historical research the day I felt watched by a seventeenth-century painting.
I remember a spring day in 1980 and the winter cold still reigning in the Pinacoteca of Forlì. In front of two huge canvases painted by Guido Cagnacci every other feeling disappeared as I began to sense the looks the painted figures were giving me from high above.
I perceived that as the answer to my ravenous demand to see and eat the world with my eyes. Here, in that moment i was being eaten from a painted canvas who seemed to be curious about me. A painting was spying on me, like it had fallen in love.
Massimo Pulini
Love has always been the main motive in the work of Miloš Todorović. Love is the starting and the ultimate point of everything.
There is an indispensable philosophical and spiritual thread in Milos Todorovic’s oeuvre, closely related to personal emotional experience and they are never existential or intellectual issues. Painting is a reflex of the process by which impulses convey emotional events from his life. The need for continual search in the necessary moments of solitude.
Speculum series further develops ideas and topics stemming from a series of work entitled Gods (2015), manifested by the urge for the visible and (in)tangible, abstract and figurative at the same time - and is a direct continuation of his previous cycle of paintings – Apocalypse Insight (22/02/2020) – which from today’s point of view, seems to be a premonition of the events which have occurred on a global scale. Stimulated by the period of residence in the empty and silence Renaissance city of Florence, the Serbo-French artist’s searches for ways of devising the portrait to the point where he eliminates all that seems superfluous to him. He leaves only a glance on the canvas – a portrait on a mirroring background presented through only one life sized EYE. His pictorial process is reversed, forms are created through light rather than shadow, where a single subject, the eye, follows the viewer, creating a feeling of invisible presence of mutual gazes.
Faces of lives lived can be seen and imagined through the sharp brushstrokes that outline floating eyes. These individuals, immersed in different shades of blue, represent a cultural heritage that blends with contemporary expressive minimalism.
Each image carries a secret, something mysterious and unfathomable that may not be labeled or fully explained, hidden beneath the mist, between the terrestrial and sublime.
Energy vibrations pulse in strong rhythm, going beyond the boundary of the visual, indulging in the power of silence and the intensity of emptiness; Transparency and plan structure of the painting are merged by continuous fluid application of layers. Miloš’s tenebrous colors range in nuances of cobalt blue, titanium white, cobalt purple and dark black, indigo – colour of the night mixed with gradations of white.
Dots of light lead to trails of hope, balancing a whole directed toward serenity as a final destination. Chased by the ghosts of the past, clouds of smoke on Milos’s works move in a vortex like the hypnotic dance of Tilda Swinton in Jarman’s film The Last of England in which devastating forces release Tilda’s dance. She tears her wedding dress apart, the murmur of the wind igniting the fire that sparks reawakened hope – from the darkness towards the light of a New Renaissance.
Nataša Radojević