Jadran Krnajski

Jadran’s Magic Mountain ‘ …. Consciously I was walking slowly down the mountains covered with snow. And what was happening there? Absolutely nothing. There was no need for anything to happen at all. I was liberated from any expectation and far away from any sound. Steady walking already turned into dancing. Its own steps, like some kind of tenderness urged the whole body, snatched away – that body was me. That walking/dancing body was me-for-example, and in that moment of perfection I expressed a ‘form of there-being prosthesis and the idea of the form there-being’, which represented to the philosopher ‘one and the same thing, expressed in two ways’ – the rule of the game and the game of rules…’ Peter Handke: ‘The Moral of Sainte-Victoire Mountain’

Not until after many years of creating his own passages through the mountain maze – namely through researches, wanderings, observations, listening to energy fields and geysers, as well as to the secret, low underground roar, did Jadran Krnajski, with his “Durmitor” cycle, definitely achieve entirely simple art passages through this mighty massif. The basis of the “Durmitor’ cycle, thus, comes out of a completely and thoroughly lived personal experience, which should not be forgotten.

All the paintings from this cycle were created through the sedimentation of the layers of the years-long dialogue between the Painter and the Mountain. It was a very long, tiresome, poly-thematic, purified and in the end a lapidary dialogue tuned to the mountain echo – only here was the sonorous feedback replaced with the artistic. In fact, Jadran’s speech (gaze) directed to the Mountain returned to him as a visually modified echo. Relying on that permanent dialogue, he gradually and calmly built every individual composition. So, in formulating every individual painting the echo of individual associations to a very particular mountain peak, crest, lake, pass, cutting, crack, valley, cirque, plateau, canyon, etc., were essential (hence the names of the paintings: Black Lake, Devil’s Lake, Skrska Lakes, Snake’s Lake, Tines, Bobot’s Hook, Colourful Passes, Red Beam, Rounded Head, Mina’s Ravine, Terza’s Ravine, Sava’s Hook, Bear, The Bridge on the Tara, Mountain Crest, Nameless Peak, Rye’s Head, Mountain Ridges, Bandierna, Small Mountain, etc.). Those associations were sometimes initiated by toponyms, names of specific regions, sometimes by their morphological characteristics, or legends and local stories, or currently found vegetation or fauna, but most often they were completely personal experiences and sensations. And Jadran very carefully, responsibly and gradually made the decision about which details to put on the canvas. Thus, there are no accidental or irrelevant details, or phantasmagorias in his paintings.

Jadran’s alternative, painterly mountain guide offers various options. For example, to those who are brave enough to look at the painting and thus commence a journey over the ridges of the Bear, a red ceremonial carpet will enfold. They will embark on a blue ship which will slowly flow upstream on the red carpet while a recently awakened cave Dragon blows at their backs; to those who take another path from the foot of the Bear, a staircase, which at the very mountain peak enters a cave and continues on the other side, reaching straight to the Moon, will appear.

When it comes to colour, the most reduced of all paintings in the cycle is ‘Durmitor from Zabljak’, where all protagonists of a show have been united, as on a stage. On this two-dimensional projection of a graphic map of the mountain, distinguished localities of Durmitor are reduced to signs and symbols, formulated in particular painter’s handwriting, of course. The key to their reading and interpreting sometimes lies in facts and legends, and sometimes in completely personal associations and experiences. Thus, on this map Sava’s Hook is shown as a pyramidal form with a fountain on one side while on the other slope a bride is ascending. This order of associations comes from a legend about Sava’s water. Namely, the legend says that St. Sava, passing through this landscape decided to take a rest and have lunch with his pupil. They were 2212m above sea level, and there was no water around them, so St. Sava made a sign of a cross above the ground with his stick and water came running from the stone. This, still active spring, which is regarded as one of the highest sources of water in limestone in the world, represents a place of pilgrimage connected with the belief that a girl who drinks water from this spring will get married the following year. On the other hand, certain drawings on this map are made based on pure visual association to the primary form of the whole – along the Red Beam a trumpet spreads out, a butterfly is glued to the Bear, while a parcel drawn into the slope of the Nameless Peak is a hardly comprehensible personal association.

Jadran Krnajski equally formulizes compositions, i.e. individual mountain wholes on paintings of the ‘Durmitor’ cycle, as islands floating on non-defined monochrome background, or as hats floating in non-specified areas. That background doesn’t suggest anything in particular – it simply adds a desired sound, provides and stresses a felling of wholeness, the autonomy of separate worlds. That background either merely supports or confronts the compact, congested entity of the painting where a drawing has the function of the left, reasonable, brain hemisphere, and the colour has the function of the dishevelled, right, one. Be it as it may, it is beyond every doubt that Jadran Krnajski considers every individual painting canvas as a rounded, territorially clearly defined whole, an isolated, restricted and protected field, a separate scenic area, an autonomous world – where according to every individual he develops a high degree of creative responsibility.

As a novelty and a peculiarity, here Jadran introduces photography as an integral part of the cycle and the production. Those are shots he took ‘on the field’ and which he chose as starting points for some of his paintings but treats them as sketches of their own kind.

Since the beginning of the 90’s, when he began to exhibit his work solo, the painter Jadran Krnajski built and developed a particular poetics which demonstrated itself as a specific variant of the urban lyric-oniric figuration. In cycles which complemented each other – ‘Candy boxes’, ‘Flags’, ‘Paintings-houses’, in overlaps of myriad of painted details, shadows, condensed rhythms, unexpected inversions in perspective, stories, sometimes silent, sometimes warm, sometimes passionate, sometimes sad, but which are always, no matter how hidden it might seem – stories about love, are woven into them. With the ‘Durmitor’ cycle, which represents 25 paintings created in the first few years of the 21st century stressing the diluted and fresh mountain air, of somewhat simplified and comelier compositions, Jadran Krnajski has made a fine shift on the path of his own painting continuity.

‘ ….’To get into objects by dreaming’ has been a maxim that guided me through the process of writing for a long time: to present the objects that I perceive to myself as if in a dream, convinced that only there they appear in their essence…’ Peter Handke: ‘The Moral of Sainte-Victoire Mountain’

By Danijela Puresevic Pressetext

Jadran Krnajski "Caps and hats from Durmitor Mountain"
paintings