An exhibition of photographs by Natalia Miladinovic and drawing interventions by Zdravko Jankovic at the Atrium Gallery of the Belgrade City Library was inaugurated by Biljana Jotic. While Natalia photographed the movements of naked bodies in the process of freeing the spirit, Zdravko continued to intervene by drawing in the newly created photographs.
The author of the text in the catalog is Biljana Jotic:
…The beauty of the art of transforming the state of matter into spirit, of the body into a sense of freedom …
Let’s take a deep breath … as we breathe, we live! This moment of inhalation separates eac individual from the outside, concentrates the interior, spirituality in relation to matter, diversity and uniqueness in relation to formality and collectivity. In this space lies the essence of man’s existence, his constant struggle and striving for the union of matter and spirit into the whole of being. When we exhale, matter remains, the body is left to external influences. Natalija Miladinovic and Zdravk Jankovic called the exhibition Spiritual because they want to introduce us, the spectators, to the specific artistic atmosphere of the spiritually liberated intimacy of the naked female body.
It all began with the idea of exploring the process of transformation of the body into spiritual freedom, with Natalia’s observation through the camera lens of the movements of individual models that carry the energy of freedom and convey different states of release. At this moment I would refer to the words of Nikolai Berdyaev: “Personality is a subject, not an object among objects, and it is rooted in the inner plane, of existence, that is, in the spiritual world, in the world of freedom. I see the Spiritual exhibition as a meeting of multiple personalities, artistic subjects and the process of liberation. It begins with Natalia’s idea of recording the processes of energy release in the rapturous movement of each model individually, followed by the process of art of transforming recorded forms into compositions with an atmosphere of intimacy even though they are naked bodies. It continues in Zdravko’s drawing interventions, symbolizing the struggle that flows through the body and spirit, a spasm that goes off like a fog. It all ends in the observer’s experience.
It is fascinating in how many forms of freedom emerged. Each photograph is a story unto itself, a composition composed of figural forms that emerge from the darkness, as if the moving images were choreographic figures of some performance in which each movement symbolized an inner story, and the integrity was at the end of the play. In this case, they could be seen as representations of life, tableau vivant, life energies concentrated in the form of motion, artificially transformed by Natalia’s conceptual spatial and compositional processing of photographic notes and Zdravko’s careful symbolic complementation of the beauty of the appearance of the female body. The exhibition Spriritual is distinguished by recording the immediacy of spiritual encounters and their artistic design. Everything leads to words being superfluous, the experience is complete if you indulge in it.
The constant beauty of art is borne by the fact that it does not die with us, remains to live, and transforms from one form to another. Like the spirit, it does not lose its appearance, it is only its appearance. Natalija Miladinovic’s artistic appearance is characterized by multimedia expression. He approaches painting by exploring the relationship of his own movement in color paintings and canvas space. In sculpture, the relationship of new materials and spaces. Her exploratory character through a camera lens and the need for spiritual beauty culminates in photographic compositions. Zdravko’s artistic appearance is most pronounced in the drawing, in which careful, careful gestures as if he does not want to disturb the atmosphere express a pronounced sensitivity to the experience of hanged states of the human mind and weakness, and pointing to them there is a noticeable cry for the colored world. When these two unobtrusive artistic sensibilities come together, the horizon is full of symbols that the SPIRITUAL exhibition displays and invites the viewer to their own experience.
