«History of art is my instrument and more specifically, the history of painting. I orchestrate the latter to depict the world I live in. Therefore, I am a contemporary painter. What motivates my day’s work is the need to follow the formal and symbolic pathway founded in the old masters’ painting, a process followed from the very beginnings of art by the painters.»
Born in 1977 in Sabac, Serbia’s fourth largest city and a true bastion of visual arts , Filip Mirazovic was introduced to painting from the age of seven by his father ,both painter and an art historian and at that time, the director of the city’s national museum.
From 1985, Filip Mirazovic travelled across the country (ex-Yugoslavia) with his parents visiting many exhibitions on contemporary art in the Balkans. He thus discovered the radical works of Rasa Todosijevic, Marina Abramovic and Irwin. However, it is the figurative paintwork which truly captured his attention. He devoured Italian renaissance painters’ art books, along with those of the Flemish and the Dutch of the XVIIth century, the French and English of the XVIIIth century, the German and French romantics, the American painters of the XIXth century and XXth century and was particularly interested in Robert Rauschenberg’s and Jasper John’s pictorial works. He began his own work by drawing reproductions of masterpieces.
In the late 80’s, he discovered Ruben’s originals for the first time at a temporary exhibition held at Belgrade’s National Museum of Fine Arts. From then on, his desire was to take the same formal path as the great painters. Following numerous visits to Serbian painters’ workshops, he started to develop his pictorial, figurative and naturalist sensitivity constantly moved by the fantastic and disturbing atmosphere.
At the time, the paintes who impressed him the most were Milic Stankovic (said Milic od Macve), the Mediala group (Leonid Seika in particular), Mica Popovic, Vladislav Lalicki, Mersad Berber, Milos Sobajic and Vladimir Velickovic.
In 1992, he left Serbia where war and an oligarchic dictatorship took over from any sense of reason.
His family sought refuge in France in the early 1990s, atime of massive Serbian emigration as Serbians were being chased out of their homeland by Milosevic’s insanity.
He settled down in Paris, where he could at last admire the major artists at the Louvre and Orsay museums. He then discovered French and international contemporary art. Several of the contemporaries aroused his vivid interest (Chris Burden, the Chapman brothers, Absalon, Henrik Plenge Jacobsen, Christian Boltanski and Stephen Balenkhol).
In 1997, Filip Mirazovic was accepted at the Paris Academy of Beaux Arts, at the same time he joined Vladimir Velickovic’s and Christian Boltanski’s artists’ workshop.
Despite a general atmosphere that mainly encouraged experimentation, he continued to pursue figurative pictorial work (oil painting has been his favourite form of artistic expression for some years). The hand movements became fuller, the range of work darker and more artificial. The black, white and grey patches adhere and run onto the canvas to confront the pastel shades of the colour range and classic structure of the setting. Occasionally, the painted surface is burnt or lacerated./p>
Compositions are straightforward and the first degree of the chosen thematic is fully assumed (purposefully limited) evoking certain formal components of socialist realism or the propaganda displays. The themes of that period: upheaval, war, indoctrination and the holocaust.
We are now in the last years of the Balkan’s tragedy and Filip Mirazovic frequently receives bad news from his country.
Constantly seeking to improve his technique (convinced that clear intention depends on mastered technique), he continues in parallel, the work of a copyist. He realizes several large sized copies of XVIIIth century French masters, including several French ports painted by Claude Joseph Vernet (La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Rochefort).
Therefore, Filip Mirazovic has maintained the deliberate choice of narrative and organised pictorial expression in the line of XVIIIth and XIXth century masters.
Between 2003 and 2005 he creates a serie of paintings ( “Vanitas Still Life”) in which he depicts the codes and components of the classical repertory to which he assigns certain 'Epinal' images of the contemporary world. In 2006 he starts a serie of large scale landscapes of the “île de France” region in wich he orchestrates myhological thematics.
Far from turning his back to the West’s artistic heritage, he steadfastly adheres to the demands of the old masters’ pictorial constructions. Looking for his own personal touch within the codes provided by the history of art. By thus doing, he enables the viewer to read between the lines and aims to establish an artistic report on the state of our civilisations (a non exhaustive theme) via realistic, observed and directed paintings.
An ambitious process dogged with endemic traps and pitfalls inherent to figurative painting itself and to the way it was perceived over the last century.
A delicate task but a path worth travelling.
Radovan MIRAZOVIC et Milivojie VASILJEVIC