PARIS.- The homage to Miodrag Djuric Dado has been worked around three major pieces painted in oil on canvas from 1975: the BOWERY TRIPTYQUE, the BOUKOKO TRIPTYQUE and the TRI PTYQUE DE NARVAL, along with the large-scale collages : À LA VILLE DE SAINT-DENIS, LE BOUCHER DE SAINT-NICOLAS, and two large-format drawings, FRIDA, LA LETTRE À MATHEY and other works on paper.

This group of works demonstrates the degree of maturity attained by the artist between 1971 and 1975, the period during which we were involved with his work.

Dado's work: an ardently dramatic mythologyt
The titles Dado gave these works relate his conception of a symbiosis between the events in his everyday life and the expression of memories that were more or less oniric.

His experience of the tragic events of war which marked his teenage years developed an ardently dramatic mythology of an imaginary world that his painting tends to exorcise by offering him a disconcertingly idyllic environment. A common denominator can be found in the humanity that dominated his nature throughout his life.

His considerable erudition enabled him to become part of French cultural life with ease. Critics readily situated him alongside Hieronymus Bosch or the early surrealists, whereas he admitted a preference for the sobriety of Primitives such as Dürer, Fouquet, painters from the Flemish Renaissance and Conrad Witz. The lyricism with which he approaches the mutations in the homunculi covering his canvases is always based on his precise knowledge of human anatomy and pathology.

The review that was published in OEIL magazine in November 1973 for one of our exhibitions defined even then the structures in this singular work.

“Dado’s fabulous mastery of his means of expression (acuteness of drawing allied to a minutious sense of observation, a magisterial ease in the handling of colour, a feeling of a complex space animated by a spell-binding softness of light) lends his visions a sense of absolute reality. The spectator is sucked into an inclined plane that in appearance is classically geometric, then pummelled in a perverse game of counter-perspectives that are based on a subtle arrangement of contrasting lights with no shadow, and precisely constructed values, by a painting that, beyond the imagery that composes it, functions through its insidious use of language.”

In each work shown here, there is the tension of total commitment. We hear an inner improvised music, an animation (in the deepest sense of the word) of the art of living in suffering, in the awareness of a destiny, in respect for memory and the vitality of hope. The gift that Dado was endowed with by nature at birth, that of being a painter, fostered this instinctual outpouring, even with all its complexity, its zestful fascination embodied pictorially.

As Jean Planque said, this painting is “inhabited from within”. From low to high pitch, from legato to tense, this special spell-binding magic offers us a new approach to self-knowledge.

Visitors meeting the work with the degree of slowness advocated by Gaëtan Picon, will appreciate the specific qualities that beguiled Jean Dubuffet when he discovered Dado as a young man in the lithography studios in Paris where he worked on arriving from his native Montenegro. Daniel Cordier ensured the renown enjoyed by his first masterpieces— L’Architecte, Thomas More and Les Polonais, as well as others which are now part of important public and private collections internationally.