ABSTRACT:
In the book the effort was made to determine the relevant place of the work of painter Petar Omcikus in the history of modern Yugoslav Art. Petar Omcikus is a Yugoslav painter who has been living living in Paris since 1952, and is an important figure of contemporary artistic scene, both Yugoslav and French. He is also a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In the years following the end of the World War Two, Petar Omcikus played an important role in the development of Modern art in Yugoslavia through his engagement with independent artistic groups “Zadar” and “Jedanaestorica”. While he remained traditional in his choice of the medium, working primarily in painting, sculpture and print, Omcikus changed his stylistic attitude several times in his career.
The work of Petar Omcikus could be identifying with his destiny, with his unwillingness to accept both the imposed life conditions (Communism) and stylistic trends specially the dominant Social Realism.
In the paintings his creative independence is shown by the lack of a unitary style. Expressionism, Lyric Abstraction, Enformel, Figuration are not only the different phases of Omcikus artistic biography but these artistic idioms and the ways in which he used them all also figure as the symptoms of his persistent and uncompromising search for his own expression. While temporarily working through vogues in art, Omcikus affirmed always the right to freedom of artistic and personal choice.
On thematic level, artists’ interest is focused toward the human being and his environment – from his portraits, trough his landscapes barbershops, beaches till barricades, pollution and sport grounds. On the formal or plastic level his painting contains always dense, often saturated colored structure, free expressive gesture and more or less recognizable subject matter. In his more abstract and Enformel works, the evocative titles given to individual paintings become especially important for they demonstrate Omcikus’s wish to communicate with the spectator instead of making his woks appear as autonomous aesthetic objects.
The key-themes of Omciku’s Art are the facture and material of color that are in the same time the barerers of articulation of painting in his abstract as well as in his figurative phases.
Michael Sephor phrase “To navigate between extremes” is applicable when speaking about Omcikus’s work. These extremes are on the one hand Nature, and on the other hand Culture – research, geometry at the basis of his artistic expression. Between the two, constantly changing from Dionysian to Apollonian, from intuitive to rational principles of creation, the work of Petar Omcikus is born before our eyes.
The book was published as a monography under the title Petar Omcikus, the painter on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre in the Gallery of Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in August 1998. The whole text is translated in French.
