Edition Balance

Berger’s essays on painting, as well as several of them that do not deal with painting, sometimes melt into studies, sometimes in stories, and sometimes they have the shape of letters, but to all of them the main subject is the new world order. In some essays this theme is predominant, in other not so obvious. To this book even more suitable title would be Against the Great Destruction of the World, but the author chose another – The Shape of a Pocket. On one occasion he explaained why he chose that title.

The pocket in fact is a little pocket of resistance. That kind of pocket is formed when two or more people that willingly associate. That is the resistance against inhumanity of new economic world order. People that associate are the reader, myself and the actors of the essays – Rembrant, Brancusi, Frida Khalo, the painters of the ancient caves, ancient Egyptians, an expert for loneliness oof certain hotel rooms, dogs in dusk, some man in the radio station. And completely unexpected, our exchange of opinions makes each and every of us stronger in our belief that this that happens in our world is wrong and that things that are in it discussed are false. I have never written a book before with the greater sense of importance.

 Vladan Matijević

With great interest the texts on Serbian painters, written by our writers between two World Wars (Rastko Petrovic, Milos Crnjanski, Isidora Sekulic, Todor Manojlovic…), are still read. Contemporary writers gladly write abou painters, but wheather they texts would be read in the next century, unfortunately does not depend on writer’s good style and inspiration, but on survival of our people and our language. Hoping for a happy outcome, or not thinking about it at all, four prominent Serbian writers offer their essays on Dada Djuric, Ljuba Popovic, Voja Stanic, Radomir Reljic, Radovan Kragulj, Vladimir Dunjic, Era Milivojevic and Milenko Miletic.

Vladan Matijević

Fiction in painting could not, through the centuries, stay in once found and permanently defined form. That shell, after certain period of time, would become too tight and would dry all live forces of the genre. Because of that, from its beginnings, it lives in the state of osmosis between its core and neighbouring areas. She flows into domains that belong to other thematic orientations. In the collection of essays named Wonders and Monsters, Vlada Urosevic in original way compares and discovers connections and influences in the work of Bosch, Brueghel, Khalo, Goya, Hugo, Grenville, Brezden, Moreau, Rops, Ensor, Solana, Simberg, Kubin, Shegal, that originate from the most important European cultures, from Spain on the West, to Finland on the North. He also lights up the connections between their and the work of literature – Shakespeare, Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kafka, Schultz, Singer. The painters about which he writes chose night, instead of daily side of the world, they chose horrible, instead of beautiful, they decided to touch cataclismical with their visionary act instead of peaceful. They did not follow the rules, straining from the beaten path, they did not agreed with imposed picture of the world, and that is why the painters of fiction are, above all, rebels.

 Vladan Matijević