At his appearance at New Gallery of Visual Arts, Vladan Matijević pointed out the nine books published within Equilibrium edition, where important writers and artists wrote about the visual art and its correlation with the moment it is made at and its reflections to future time.

In their essays and art reviews, all of them wrote about the context in which art is made, how artists affect a line of thought of a society, trying to answer the interesting and complex question of ‘What is art?’, considering the definitions of beauty, taste, symbolism and methods of representation and exploring the relationship between artist and audience.

In 2006 the Art Gallery Nadežda Petrović in Čačak started the edition Equilibrium, dedicated to art criticism and essays. The edition includes a book of essays by artist and art theorist Milija Belić Ars longa, John Berger’s book of essays Shape of a Pocket, Memories of Art by Branko Kukić, Svetislav Basara, Jovica Aćin and David Albahari and two books of essays by Vlada Urošević Miracles and Monsters and The Fantasized Worlds.

The Gallery also published the art reviews by the artist Nadežda Petrović, after whom it is named, for the first time in one volume, the art reviews by Rastko Petrović titled Art Exhibitions, Charles Baudelaire’s Delacroix and The Religious Conception of Art by Momčilo Nastasijević.

Matijević also spoke about the conceptual apparatus used to discuss visual arts from Baudelaire to Berger, the relationship between art and technology, art in the electronic era, the relationship between a work of literature and a work of visual art and their answers to the questions of reality.

On the topic of his latest novel Freedom of Speech, the author spoke of the image of reality created by the media and this century’s phenomenon of adjusting occurences to news. Answering the question of how art responds to such an image of reality, Matijević told the artists have always been the captives of the time they’ve lived in.

“They represent it their way, in their own form and style that can be realistic, fantastic, abstract, absurd, comical or dramatic. Yet in his work the artist is always speaking about the relationship between the world and a man and about the human courage to be free or fear and cowardness that is non-freedom,” said Matijević.

He also spoke about the historical nightmare the protagonists of his novels are “stuck” in and of the Kafka century that is not coming to an end.

Vladan Matijević (b. 1962), writer and directing editor of publishing of Art Gallery Nadežda Petrović in Čačak.