Brest (AFP)

An important retrospective of the Serbian painter, draftsman, engraver and tragic sculptor Vladimir Velickovic, which highlights the absence of nature in his work, is presented from Sunday at the Fond Hélène et Édouard Leclerc (FHEL) in Landerneau (Finistère).

Since his exhibitions in Moscow in 2004, Montreal in 2005 or Toulouse in 2011, "no significant retrospective had been devoted to Vladimir Velickovic", argues the FHEL, created in 2011 in the former convent which housed the first warehouses of Leclerc stores in the 1960s.

A hundred works by the artist, who died on August 29, are presented around the main themes - the last retrospectives were presented chronologically - that are the integration of time, harmony and rhythm, with in the center of the course, the essential relationship of the artist with the German painter Matthias Grünewald.

The works of his youth and the most recent are however also presented, revealing a constant over more than half a century: the absence of nature in his work.

"You will never find the slightest flower, the smallest blade of grass, the least tree, the smallest body of water ...", assures Jean-Luc Chalumeau, curator of the exhibition, to AFP which illustrates "the anguish of man deprived of nature". "Velickovic is a tragic painter in this sense", he underlines.

"His intuition of youth, he continued until his death, that's what we are trying to show in this exhibition", continues the expert about this artist with "sad eyes".

"He is an artist difficult to grasp for the public and we will ask the public to make an effort," notes the commissioner.

His works, often gray or black with touches of red, most often represent torture or death, as in the painting "Landscape with dead birds" of 1964, which shows a landscape without vegetation under a uniformly white light where the only black birds are distinguished. "Everything happens as if the human species had lost the sense of nature", explains the Fund in a presentation.

Born August 11, 1935 in Belgrade, Velickovic was marked by the horrors of the Second World War, then by those of the explosion of Yugoslavia in the 90s.

The exhibition is held until April 26 at the FHEL, where artists such as Picasso, Chagall, Giacometti and Dubuffet have already been exhibited.

© 2019 AFP