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Text from Alain Bosque


THE TRAGIC FOLKLORE OF DEDIC

Usually, painters who draw their subject matter from the human treasure of their native lands limit themselves to expressing this treasure in a respectful way in which every single detail is painted in a realistic manner. This kind of realism, which includes a feeling for society, the love of one’s roots and sometimes, political intentions, is also Dedic’s starting point, but he uses it to escape to wider and more painful horizons. He doesn’t reject either the impact or the richness of this folklore, but he goes beyond it. Many of his works seem to go to the essence of the old world of the peasants; other works portray a nostalgia for ancestral crafts. We meet people whom we guess are Balkan…we see the fields being worked…we feel that we are in the presence of precise memories of workers, builders and architects who are totally absorbed by their crafts.
Dedic’s intentions should not be misconstrued –he is in no way seeking to glorify any class of people. He intimately knows the nature of a crowd and all his paintings exude a feeling of human solidarity. On the one hand, he asks us not to consider his art as the simple product of his imagination, and on the other hand, he doesn’t want us to forget his origins. If we insist on these aspects, it’s because first and foremost, there is a swarming mass of people in his paintings, a kind of Tower of Babel. The result of this –and it is perhaps one of the cardinal virtues of Dedic’s art—is a universe of dreams, of fantasy and of endless struggle which can never be the fruit of a solitary reverie. The numerous personages in this paintings seem to be inevitable and seem to be constantly on trial… and we too are solicited, for Dedic asks us to become a part of his fantasms and even of his aberrations.
And so, we’re never alone when we look at one of Dedic’s paintings or drawings. This involves a great responsibility. Dedic paints in a meticulous and grave manner, in a clear manner, and we rapidly become his accomplices. Some painters prefer approximations and dream-like zones for which several interpretations are possible; Dedic is frank and thorough and imposes situations from which there is no escape. Is this primitivism or even naivety? On the contrary, it seems that Dedic’s aim is to fill-up every single corner, every bit of space and every possibility on the canvas so that nothing is left either to chance or to the imagination. Dedic invites us – quite directly and even with healthy brutality – to participate in his paintings, but he doesn’t allow us to choose our roles; Dedic imposes roles on us. We can try to resist, but we’re soon obliged to surrender. We’re faced with power and passion, with canvases painted in non-replicated colours and drawn with vital, resolute, implacable lines.
Having become the inhabitants of Dedic’s universe, we naturally have to ask ourselves what this universe consists of. A coloured drawing – “The Multiple Man” – provides us with a plausible answer; it represents an enormous head on which about ten smaller heads in various positions have been grafted. The heads cancel each other out and their multiplicity distorts their meaning. There is an impression of constant alienation, but also an impression of intensity. Our face is composed of a thousand real or imaginary faces which finally break-up the face and then slowly recompose it. Often, Dedic shows us prison. These prisons have variable forms – they are sometimes exterior and reflect the servitudes of our body, but they are also sometimes internal, linked to our psychical life and symbols of our hesitation, our uneasiness and a dreadful anguish which can only be represented by delirious images.
Dedic is also haunted by myths and he sometimes gives us some very unexpected images of well-known myths by adding personal details and lyricism to our mental folklore. For example, the bull-fighting scene in “Betrayal of Memory” becomes a challenge to what we usually remember about bullfights… However, Dedic always brings us back to crowds…we don’t have the right to isolate ourselves in our private life or in our dreams because according to Dedic, our punishment is to live in a state of upheaval and to be constantly contradicted by other strange lives and dreams. There is an unnecessary person, an unnecessary presence, an unnecessary colour, and yet these unnecessary elements are not really in Dedic’s paintings, they are in us. It’s almost as if our destiny is to never attain the essential and to constantly have to fight against an eternal invasion. If we attempt to define Dedic’s philosophy, then at least one aspect of his message is clear: solitude no longer exists.
The surprising element in all this is that in the midst of all these people and monsters we discover a kind of protection. We are therefore interpenetrable. We are not ourselves. We belong to a tragic folklore. As in the well-known proverb, hell is not in others, it’s in ourselves and despite ourselves it has been transplanted in others. There’s no way for us to escape from the meaning of Dedic’s art.

ALAIN BOSQUET
Summer,1980



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