In the centre of his painter universe, Josip Mijić places the man and man’s relationship to oneself and others. He did not do this accidentally. The man is, as a complex material and spiritual creature, in many symbolic stories described as a synthesis of the world, as a macrocosm – universe’s model in scale. The man is made from the same elements that make the universe (bones are made of dirt, blood of water, lungs of air, head/brain from fire/light…) the man in the symbolic interpretation of one’s existence, touches three levels of cosmic reality – the earthly with his feet, the atmospheric with his chest, and the celestial with his head- and since the man was (according to the Bible) made in God’s image, despite being denied the sameness with the Maker at the very beginning of creation, he is an ideal intersection of cosmic relationships and touches of the microcosm (man’s being, his own self) with the macrocosm – understood not only as the naked universe but as a wholeness and all-encompassing thought of God, as the idea and strength of the universe.

Mijić himself will pose a question about the man and his shinning existence: “What makes man a man? Bones, skin, muscle, hair, legs, arms, or something else? Even though I am matter, the man represents a being much more exalted than the matter itself, he represents that that matter alone, in itself cannot be. Even though man is small and simple, he is extremely visible and important. He is the essence and measure of things, he is that something that radiates from him, the thing that makes the brightest point in all matter, even though small in the infinity of space, for his light and joy for life, man manages to impose himself as the most urgent factor in existential specificities.”

Those kinds of poetic ponderings and thoughts, the painter literally transfers and builds in the set spaces of the images. But, paradoxically, he didn’t form his painter’s idiolect on the postulates of the figural provenance, as one might expect given the themes he covered – but he dived into the complex spheres of the associative, into the thick layers of structural matter, that, with its reality, coarseness, cracks, layers, and scrunches, became a symbolic stage of interpersonal connections and relationships. Its blackness and magma like density Mijić does are not signs of someone’s negation of life, on the contrary, they are the primal blackness, the moist darkness of the womb, the warm dark of the underground, even though they are the symbols of death, they are equally, if not more, strong symbols of making a new life (in the warmth of the dark underground the seed gathers the juices to sprout towards the sun, by exiting the darkness of the womb, the scream of the new life frees itself), that is identified and materialized in the presence of the light.

By condensing, or rather, resetting the real to the original importance – to the existential, dichotomously portrayed/confronted as a relationship between the material (structural density of the surface and the materiality of the paint) and the spiritual, that materially competes and makes whole (the light, illuminated, stylized characters of human stories), Mijić opted for the interpretative solution that does not doubt the possibility of the language of signs: with reduced signs (symbols) he can come closer to the truth and the creative, working, active reality closer than in any realistic-mimetic interpretation based on the narrative illusionism in the sense of the storytelling objectivity or iconographic specificity of the characters (as something or someone). The trust, or the realism, of the image, is not measured by how much the painted shapes look like the object they represent, but how much the image is capable of making a relationship with the reality and precisely convey the reflexions of the artist’s perception. The insistence on the important necessarily moves away the path towards the associative and the abstraction, and that is the assumption to create synthetic wholes and relationships of the complete language and semantic openness.

Mijić’s surrender to the silent, yet deep meditative sensibility, took him in exactly that direction: the all-encompassing condensing, he turns off all extra clues in the image he boils down to the collision of thick, dark, monochromatic pictorial matter (where the grey-black part of the achromatic spectrum prevails) with a few light surfaces or characters, that like a luminous key open the well- hidden keyholes of meaning. This is not about the light that comes as a simple perceptive, optical phenomenon contrary to the dark of the matter- this is a “speculative light” (the light of the character is a mark of the energetic field – the light of its being) that is “other/internal light” that symbolically makes and emphasizes the value of being that is often thoroughly opposed to the ephemeral self-indulgence of existence.

In the collision of light and dark, everything empty in the world becomes apparent, as well as the hope in the better future. “A thick layer of dark matter opposed to the single, only ray of light. One single joyous, well-intentioned, happy person who cares for others, for the immaterial that most people bow to, who cares about relationships, feelings, separating people from things.”

In the painterly view, this is said in a syntax that tests the frames and limits of painting and affirm possibilities of the painting, truth, sentenced to the burden of ascetics, but because of it, it is very verbal in the associative and world-view way.

Submitting everything to the cerebral experience, Mijić created his own morphological and aesthetic system, merging it with the meaning and function of painting, and in the frames of the programme that he always radically finishes during his working process. By collecting, in the same physical field of multiple painterly ecstasies – the absolute of smooth, painted surface treated as pure abstract form, and then existentiality of the material inextricably linked with the dynamic of the gestural and the density of the material (pictorial matter) and freed imagination and its traces (in places of emphatic piling of colour, intentional cracks that are drawings in themselves and emphasize a pleasant structuralism and layer of the image’s fundus, and emphatic lines of individual characters and individual coloured fields) he consistently announces diagrams of his spiritual and emotional turmoil, revealing his moral and ethical stances and beliefs.

“Man opposed to heaviness. But what is life if not overcoming difficulties? In the end we come from the beginning. A nameless man, image with no name. All of us in the same picture. Our ups and downs. And one light that brings hope.”

In the centre of his painter universe, Josip Mijić places the man and man’s relationship to oneself and others. He did not do this accidentally. The man is, as a complex material and spiritual creature, in many symbolic stories described as a synthesis of the world, as a macrocosm – universe’s model in scale. The man is made from the same elements that make the universe (bones are made of dirt, blood of water, lungs of air, head/brain from fire/light…) the man in the symbolic interpretation of one’s existence, touches three levels of cosmic reality – the earthly with his feet, the atmospheric with his chest, and the celestial with his head- and since the man was (according to the Bible) made in God’s image, despite being denied the sameness with the Maker at the very beginning of creation, he is an ideal intersection of cosmic relationships and touches of the microcosm (man’s being, his own self) with the macrocosm – understood not only as the naked universe but as a wholeness and all-encompassing thought of God, as the idea and strength of the universe.

Mijić himself will pose a question about the man and his shinning existence: “What makes man a man? Bones, skin, muscle, hair, legs, arms, or something else? Even though I am matter, the man represents a being much more exalted than the matter itself, he represents that that matter alone, in itself cannot be. Even though man is small and simple, he is extremely visible and important. He is the essence and measure of things, he is that something that radiates from him, the thing that makes the brightest point in all matter, even though small in the infinity of space, for his light and joy for life, man manages to impose himself as the most urgent factor in existential specificities.”

Those kinds of poetic ponderings and thoughts, the painter literally transfers and builds in the set spaces of the images. But, paradoxically, he didn’t form his painter’s idiolect on the postulates of the figural provenance, as one might expect given the themes he covered – but he dived into the complex spheres of the associative, into the thick layers of structural matter, that, with its reality, coarseness, cracks, layers, and scrunches, became a symbolic stage of interpersonal connections and relationships. Its blackness and magma like density Mijić does are not signs of someone’s negation of life, on the contrary, they are the primal blackness, the moist darkness of the womb, the warm dark of the underground, even though they are the symbols of death, they are equally, if not more, strong symbols of making a new life (in the warmth of the dark underground the seed gathers the juices to sprout towards the sun, by exiting the darkness of the womb, the scream of the new life frees itself), that is identified and materialized in the presence of the light.

By condensing, or rather, resetting the real to the original importance – to the existential, dichotomously portrayed/confronted as a relationship between the material (structural density of the surface and the materiality of the paint) and the spiritual, that materially competes and makes whole (the light, illuminated, stylized characters of human stories), Mijić opted for the interpretative solution that does not doubt the possibility of the language of signs: with reduced signs (symbols) he can come closer to the truth and the creative, working, active reality closer than in any realistic-mimetic interpretation based on the narrative illusionism in the sense of the storytelling objectivity or iconographic specificity of the characters (as something or someone). The trust, or the realism, of the image, is not measured by how much the painted shapes look like the object they represent, but how much the image is capable of making a relationship with the reality and precisely convey the reflexions of the artist’s perception. The insistence on the important necessarily moves away the path towards the associative and the abstraction, and that is the assumption to create synthetic wholes and relationships of the complete language and semantic openness.

Mijić’s surrender to the silent, yet deep meditative sensibility, took him in exactly that direction: the all-encompassing condensing, he turns off all extra clues in the image he boils down to the collision of thick, dark, monochromatic pictorial matter (where the grey-black part of the achromatic spectrum prevails) with a few light surfaces or characters, that like a luminous key open the well- hidden keyholes of meaning. This is not about the light that comes as a simple perceptive, optical phenomenon contrary to the dark of the matter- this is a “speculative light” (the light of the character is a mark of the energetic field – the light of its being) that is “other/internal light” that symbolically makes and emphasizes the value of being that is often thoroughly opposed to the ephemeral self-indulgence of existence.

In the collision of light and dark, everything empty in the world becomes apparent, as well as the hope in the better future. “A thick layer of dark matter opposed to the single, only ray of light. One single joyous, well-intentioned, happy person who cares for others, for the immaterial that most people bow to, who cares about relationships, feelings, separating people from things.”

In the painterly view, this is said in a syntax that tests the frames and limits of painting and affirm possibilities of the painting, truth, sentenced to the burden of ascetics, but because of it, it is very verbal in the associative and world-view way.

Submitting everything to the cerebral experience, Mijić created his own morphological and aesthetic system, merging it with the meaning and function of painting, and in the frames of the programme that he always radically finishes during his working process. By collecting, in the same physical field of multiple painterly ecstasies – the absolute of smooth, painted surface treated as pure abstract form, and then existentiality of the material inextricably linked with the dynamic of the gestural and the density of the material (pictorial matter) and freed imagination and its traces (in places of emphatic piling of colour, intentional cracks that are drawings in themselves and emphasize a pleasant structuralism and layer of the image’s fundus, and emphatic lines of individual characters and individual coloured fields) he consistently announces diagrams of his spiritual and emotional turmoil, revealing his moral and ethical stances and beliefs.

“Man opposed to heaviness. But what is life if not overcoming difficulties? In the end we come from the beginning. A nameless man, image with no name. All of us in one picture. Our ups and downs. And one light that brings hope.”

The blackness of night, painted in poetic images so many times, is not a terrible blackness. As much as the poetic words and images speak of its blackness and darkness, as much as someone perceives them and imagines them as uncertainty, a threat, a horrible hopelessness, the images of dark night are messengers of morning and dawn, day and light. And as much as the factual human reality is so changeable and fragile, and as much as it is a “dungeon of the human soul”, sometimes there are tiny cracks through which an indestructible spirit emerges and wiggles out of, Plotin-like, aware of the Fullness, itcomes towards “That One” (it him). The Cosmos is, regardless of what it is in itself, is the human’s home. And, as far as we know, its small end belongs to the sensible, sensitive creature. If black, space holes exist, somewhere in their corners persists, survives, a human that the Bible calls Adam (Adam is the field, land, earth’s dust).

Josip Mijić is a painter that deals with the enigma of space. The question: Where am I? For him, this is a fundamental question from which a conclusion emerges, like the one from Deacrtes: I am still here, but I am on the edge, and “I” am. And matter, which he often presents with thick layers of paint, from himself and with himself, with contraction and breaking, structures itself – or the painter forces it to show itself in the multitude of its “amorphity” and the initial shapeness (like in the trough of a dried up river), or, in other cases, the less there is there, the less it is itself, the more it fluctuates and in her departure in the infinity, the edges of the picture do not stop. The amorphic matter and darkness in front of the man are like a puzzle, and a possibility, like a promise. The painter deals with the mystery and the fact of the matter and space with indifference and emotional impulsivity. He uses one picture of unknowns, that push him into the deadness and shake his soul, with another, similar unknown. Diptychs and triptychs, arranged vertically and horizontally, are just variations and self-talk of a shapeless, dead matter. It is with this painterly procedure, that he associatively, if not pretentiously – speaks about light and shape, about the possible and new, about the facts that are not sufficient to themselves. When darkness is, when the matter is (just) mud, whether it is earthly, cosmically, “and I” is – so there is a man and there is the world. And all people are in that picture.

Mijić’s pictures remind us of chaos – as the Greek cosmology portrays it: of a state with no order, or more accurately, raw material for an order. Matter that is, makes a promise. In its greyness and blackness, some lights are represented, unobtrusive, or some man drags himself towards the edge. The light is waiting, passive. “And the light glows in the darkness, and the darkness does not prevail” (lv 1.5), but because it is there, because it is, it reminds us of the origin, the beginning of things: “In the beginning there was Word (…) and through Him all things were made” (lv 1-2). And the appearance of man – Earthling – is the beginning of the order of spiritual matter. And all us humans, as physical-spiritual beings, are in one picture. This time in Mijić’s pictures.