On the Art of Danilo Stankovic

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen

Rather bilateral visions bustle between the eye and another eye, another which remains submissive for the moment, while the other is free to contemplate on its blind spot. Visual expression draws from the depths of Scandinavian and Serbian tradition and folklore, ever more convincing. By experience something so light falls. It falls so slow that it gains eternal status. First there is the feeling that the rain never stops, then it starts to rain. And so we experience the heavens. After this winds escalate to such proportions that sun is blown closer to us. Noon is always near. Air travels trough its own planes from a sphere to another, holding to a standard amount of occident. Space under the surface increases, the surface gets thinner, inner layers disapear, the form swells, the colors fade, the colors illuminate, the skin expands, the strength of the surface to carry decreases, and these thick horns pierce the surface of a delusional world.

The drawings radiate mystical elements, while the painting does likewise, colors are divided in to high and low, dark and light, local and lost, a cloud on the wall. Formally drawing near, seating in intimate distance, touching. Thought flees certain observations in to undefined relics. Beginning is near.

The spirits hold steady. A certain Godhead escorts illustrations of the newly born in front of us. Vision might appear on the viewers lips, in which case it might as well take his word. Lips drip sweets, heat slides on them. Mouth smacks, ones hunger materialize, it becomes food. Mud flows down to the river. River becomes brown. River washes clean. Water remains blue. Sun continues approaching towards our direction hiding behind what we saw in the morning light in front of us. Our vision brightens. This brightness does not blind us. As the temperature rises directions appear in present conditions which are not based on human observations, but the undivided space we often forget exists in us. It is to be shared. It is easy to look ahead, turn around and think of knowing by the surrounding the location of ones self.

A spirit takes fortune in human just as a human picks a single straw to be one of his own collectively with the rest of his belongings, it molds its opponents for challenge. This is a world of ones own, world where steps repeat choreography. Dancing leads to the question of the sensibleness of all movement. What ever has been learned, what ever thought, melts to a whole natural course of motion from the swinging of the feet to the susurrus of branches. Colors change according to the sense of coloring and everything regresses in to a single breath.

It appears that mountains and hills, and more specifically the slopes leaning to their summits, against their hights, used to announce subjects to the world, which one could identify as ornaments. Protecting images are built according to them, as to resemble salvation, the strength to lift has evaporated from these slopes characterized by their steepness and hardy inhabitants. Now the slopes lay on top of their support, the mountain which covers the under core rooted deep in the soil. They no longer possess the ability to stand upright in order to make the summit fall in to their midst. Anyhow the topography of the scenery is in a constant change, though what ever hight it maybe be, it remains.

Guise descends towards the darkened valley, while the ones carrying their heavy paired horns correspondingly head to the summit. Without acknowledging their rivals existence, they pass each other, the hems of their garments touch, there is a tone in the air. As the ones reach the top they may testify how the goat on the summit softens the land by scraping it. Perhaps this is why they could have been thought to be the very essence of evil. Since whom ever interferes with the silence of the high-ground may be either indifferent or evil. Nothing else. The assumption is the same, no matter what the motives are said to have been. Prayer is being resitated from the vantage point facing the high-ground, the valley remains in the middle, wishing images of the winter light from which the balance of the story wells up and benefits of itself, which we ought to realize.

One regards to have cleared ones way consistently. This act is rooted on a common ignorance, which is the need to create a way to begin with. As if otherwise being stuck in ones own predefined location. One might think that because life doesn't burst by choice of the singular living, nothing can be affected from the birth-perspective. Way must be cleared. Another location must be reached. One refuses to adapt to ones purpose of remaining still. This translates in to the surrounding landscape. The landscape creates a space within oneself. One is to change shape at that very spot. This is generally being ignored by the way, as if the road itself would take the journey for our behalf. Whereas thought-world grows in all solitude like a sculpture, getting its shape in the act of lapsing from the bottomless pit of ceased material, maternity.

These trees of motherhood replace their inborn intuition of reaching to the skies with a final bow according to the opposite tradition to theirs. In the Swedish past, this was done in practice by pulling young stems back down from their headwaters. Burying the top for it to root again, the tree grew as an arc. Resulting from this the tree rises as it grows from the ground and leads back to the ground, only for people to remove amadou more comfortably from it as it ages. And people get thirsty, there is too much that could be done, while they only recognized their own attribution. Stream leads the water penetrating in to all stone. The stones sink in to the ground and somewhere else the crust of the earth declines even deeper towards its center. The mind reacts consciously to these stimulations. The worlds tremble as the stars unite. Hallucinations grow in power as the gauze-like substance glides in front of the stagnant eyes. The gauze glides over the roof of the forest. It drifts slowly in this blink of an eye in a search of the same form beneath itself, the form which it adopted in the first place. Eyes become dry. The gauze finds the place, turns upwards, becomes a curtain in a ladscape which undulates in that similar fashion as the forest roof, which the gauze took of from. A human drills his sight trough the soft bare symmetry. He remains blind for the horizon line. His eyes blink. He reunites with his surroundings, grows in to himself whereas the nature apart from him grows intensely around him. His body is trapped. His spirit recognizes itself and copies his mind obsessively in order to remain in him. He places his face on the surface.