Night flight, 2003
A Flight with a Title
By Natalija Cerović, Historian of Art and Curator
Exhibition “NIGHT FLIGHT – 100 Years of World Aviation 1903-2003”
by Bogdan & Miško Pavlović, Yugoslav Aircraft Museum , 2003
Flying has always been a symbol of freedom. History remembers many and various attempts to conquer this ideal: myth, science, metaphysics, and sport. The aspiring of Daedalus and Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci, Lindbergh, Gagarin and many others are widely known.
Regarding the art project for which this text is written the association goes towards the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville who were the first to soar successfully towards the sky with the help of mechanical device.
At that time an art painting gained its legitimacy as an autonomous reality, later to be developed through numerous creative expressions. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century and III millennium art, marked with firm vitality and sings of its own time, exists through a number of contemporary occurrences and forms, in which a painting is a symbol for immediate creative motion.
The Pavlović brothers, Miško and Bogdan, have opted for an art discipline, for the possibility of free flying through the void of existence and the spiritual. In that they are similar to the Wright brothers. And, of course, equally successful.
Their exhibition, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ flight, radiates freshness coming from the joy of discovering new possibilities of expression and communication which, in turn, make a creative step forward possible. The display opens up new poetic horizons and symbolically links the two yearnings. However, the joint project reveals shifts in individual artistic exploration and creation of personal attitude.
Accepting and judging a work of art we tend to rely on an artist’s biography, his journeys, teachers, academies (schoolings). Or, trying to get closer to the very essence of a work of art, we lean on art history and theory in order to draw conclusions about the work’s inner life from aesthetic opinions and definitions. For the Pavlović brothers this is of no significance for they belong to that type of begetters, whose inner experience is stronger and fuller than the superficial one, yet not excluding one from the other.
They fly confidently through the possibilities of the media using mostly collage procedures only to extract elements of their own poetics and determine the contents of their creative efforts.
The exhibition is rounded by the motive of the aviation history and different aircraft models. Yet, artists’ essential yearnings, both emotionally and spiritually, are directed towards the establishment of shape and its multisignified denotations, allegorical and metaphysical, according to the measure of personal creative experience of each of the brothers. The Pavlović brothers take unique time as a playground for the destiny of their emotions, fears and hopes.
Through unexpected associations they cross the boundaries between what are past, present and future.
