Art Critic

Dejan Dorić

About the Painter

Belgrade, 2024. god

Immanuel Kant considered architecture the supreme and most important art — the one that integrates and surpasses all others. In the cycle “Pillars of Time,” the old European architecture becomes Mirjana Milovanović’s point of departure for aesthetic phenomena that go far beyond simply illustrating the appearance and location of a building, its proportions, decoration, or urban belonging. Her painting opens toward representations of frontal and lateral views of structures, although this is not the urban, perspectival depiction that developed in Renaissance Italy.

These melancholic and philosophical paintings speak about transience, decay, and the wearing down of even the most durable and monumental creations of humankind — from the pyramids to the Hoover Dam, the structure in which the most concrete was poured and which would, in theory, last the longest among works of modern civilization. Yet this is ultimately a story about time — a tale of the beauty of impermanence, of humanity and imperfection, of the trace of the hand on the painting and on the building, traces that do not belong to a machine-robotic world because they bear an individual imprint, warm and personal, expressed in the language of Orthodox theology.

Well-versed in design and contemporary media, Mirjana Milovanović, instead of contributing to the current pictorial overflow — the inflation of images brought by the post-postmodern era — instead of yet another cold gaze and another step toward a possible digital apocalypse, creates powerful paintings. She explores what is deepest and most precious: emotions, which still shape us and define our relationship to the world. The architecture she paints, marked by time and impermanence, can be — as we see in her work — among other things a colossal reservoir of intuitions, dreams, and hopes, a trigger for imagination and an emotional experience of space and time, something that is increasingly disappearing from art.