Retrospect 'Mind Hunter'

The independent exhibition of Milo Sakač called „Mindhunter“ is the fourth presentation of his works in Vienna. This is the choice of a part of one entirety of large format abstract paintings where he presents his most recent works. The subject is the rounded cycle being a logic continuation of his prior reflexions and artistic expression, where decomposing the painting and decanting the forms that have had some architectural element or raster in the background being discernible under the epidermis of the abstract mass of colours, lines or material, have been seen. His mastering the abstraction has developed gradually. Sakač is an architect by profession and this has been reflected in his painting and in his seeking artistic expression. This coherent entirety has generated from his seeking, proving his vital creativity and enviable production. His prior abstract art, where he has been present during the last years, has been characterized by the irregular but controlled lines creating strong architectural structures with a powerful feeling of composition and achieving rudimentary forms. In his prior cycles and paintings the space has been suggested by lines, the windows and doors have been suggested by squares, the poplar-trees by ovals etc. He has gradually reduced the motifs that have been only discernible under the thick fine paint coats as he has insisted on the intensive paint coats and the materiality physically incorporated in his paintings. He has suppressed the colour palette and has restricted the tonal range. Therefore, black, grey and white shades, sometimes with bluish tints have dominated the paintings, while some structures have been occasionally accentuated and dynamized by ochre yellow and red. Following the doyens of abstraction Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning or Edo Murtić, he has included automatism or intuitive, irrational and accidental concept in the creation of an art work. His co-automated motions and interventions by which some spontaneous and gestural traces are created are present in his art. On the other hand, his art is controlled in the black-white compositions and led by the influence of Franz Kline and in such paintings he has created some strongly dominant structures.

The art poetics dominates this recent cycle where he abolishes all connotations of architectural and motivational structure and is focused on the colours and the texture of paint coats. Colours are mutually joined and blended in his paintings, making the unity where one colour emerges from the other and the colours become imbued and play with each other, while the artist intervenes only with individual coloristic accent and flare-up giving dynamics to his paintings. His paintings are emancipated from the imperative of meaning that has not been fully abolished up to that cycle, but has only left more and more place to the formal expression as the main holder of the painting. The artist himself has given a hint at his own asociativity by the suggestive names of his earlier cycles of paintings such as F4, Two Heads, Locomotive, Regattas etc. In this cycle the artist presents only his own impression, movement, ductus, but also the intimate emotion fascinating us with these spacious suggestive canvases that catch our „mental associations“ and he draws us into his world of emotionality, woven into the epidermis of his works.

Text of the exhibition: Magdalena Getaldić, art historian