Zaseban ciklus čine slike voća (šljive, maline, kupine, trešnje, jabuke) na kojima je unesena tekstualna poruka sa njihovim nazivom, tek toliko da se naglasi njihovo osnovno značenje u kulturi koja gubi vezu sa prirodom jer imenovanje tu vezu održava. Subjektivnost potrošačke kulture kao nove medijske realnosti – kojom dominiraju industrijske konzerve, zapakovano genetski modifikovano voće u najlonu koje jedino preko etiketa sa pakovanja i reklamnih poruka ostvaruje vezu sa prirodom koja potvrđuje autentičnost proizvoda – postaje podlogom na kojoj izrastaju autentične umjetničke očiglednosti. U svojoj vizuelnoj naraciji umjetnik prelazi sa velikih formata mnoštva voća na pojedinačne prizore pojedinih komada, koji svojom vizuelnom i tekstualnom porukom žele da naglase iz mnoštva samo ono jedno u značenju koje ta slika produkuje, kao svojevrstan simulakrum same poruke, definišući na taj način svoj odnos prema slikarskoj tradiciji ali i masovnoj kulturi.Velizar Krstić svoju likovnu naraciju gradi kroz postmodernističku kulturu simulakruma u kojoj vještačka, otuđena i sve prisutnija popularna umjetnost postaje nova simulirana realnost u kojoj se brišu granice između potrošnje i informacije, zabave i života, iluzije i realnosti. Na izvjestan način ispostavlja nostalgiiju prema prošlosti, jer mu ta nostalgija postaje valjanom osnovom za umjetničku praksu koja duboko ukorjenjuje umjetnikovu (i našu) sadašnjost, a sve u potrazi za novom govornom pozicijom umjetničkog subjekta.

PAINTINGS, GRAPHICS, DRAWINGS


When we observe the creative work of Velizar Krstic we can see a specific speech position of the artist. That specific quality is completely turned towards the strong individual thinking of the painter, expressed through traditional visual media of painting, graphics, sculptures and drawings. Restored meaning of a subject - framed by the social attitudes of the artist, that appearance of a new figuration introduce as the figurative art of the post humanistic epoch - the discourse is important that influenced the formation of artistic character and profile of Velizar Krstic.
Conceiving his new visual theme, he started with his recognizable personal poetics with emphasized artistic maturity and great experience but realized through the cycle Memorials. In that way he joined everyday human mithologization turned towards cruel war reality. Certain sensuality, subjectivism and pointing out the personal author's attitude are the characteristics of artistic practice of Velizar Krstic that in the spirit of postmodernism reconsider known art phenomena from history of art heritage. By his reflective personality and criticism he tries to create synthesis and assimilation of different artistic experiences. The syntagm  “art asa theme of art” in the best way can explain his correspondence with Francis Bacon, Van Gogh and other resources, that help him to make a history connection and specific intellectual game whose aim is demythologization and demystification.
Recently Velizar Krstic forms his art speech in the way he focuses his interest on the mass media, film and other topics from the world of spectacles, connecting them with his inspiring models from history of art and with the persons hi is close to. Involving this content in his art, he freely links different sources, introducing them to a new context, and in that context they get different meaning. The big size portraits, where the intensive colors dominate and where some other content behind the big heads intrudes, are the artist's need to involve the everyday life in his creative speech. That is the influence of advertising billboards, especially political bills which are around us, but his portraits are without ideology and propaganda and they serve only as a visual pattern. The visually of billboard and political bills phenomenon are the facts of everyday life and as such affect the work of Velizar Krstic. Through those patterns the artist tells us in a fault-finding manner that their significance is temporary and that it is quickly overcomed by everyday dynamic. It is often the case that such “phenomenology of spirit” is only understood when it is out of everyday life context where originally appeared. Only then its universality follows.
A separate cycle includes paintings of fruits (plums, blackberries, cherries, apples) which have their textual message including their names, just enough to emphasize their primary meaning in culture that is loosing the connection with the nature since naming keeps up that connection. The subjectivism of consumer society as a new media reality – where industrial cans and modified fruits packed in plastic bags dominate and only their stickers confirm their authenticity – becomes the basis for an authentic artistic manifestation. In his visual narration the artist goes from the big size of abundance of fruits to particular pieces which by their visual and textual message want to distinguish only one meaning from many others that those paintings produce as a simulacrum of the message itself. In that way the artist define his relationship towards art tradition and mass culture as well.
Velizar Krstic create his art narration through simulacrum of post modernistic culture where the artificial, alienated and more and more present pop culture becomes simulated reality. In that reality the borders between consuming and information, fun and life, illusion and reality are erased. He expresses nostalgia for the past in a certain manner, because that nostalgia becomes the basis for the art practice deep-rooting the artist's (and ours) present time, in order to search for a new speech position of the artist.

FASCINATION WITH THE OBJECT – NEW PAINTINGS AND OBJECTS BY VELIZAR KRSTIC


Does Velizar Krstić like sweets? Yes. No. Maybe. In any case, the question is possible, for someone even justified, but essentially quite irrelevant for a discourse about his works although they are original initiators of the question. Why has this painter chosen a very general topic of Agora, or marketplace to make a series of objects that simulate different sweets? Underneath such an undertaking should be his fascination with object–world, centered on relevant objects – undoubtedly those that can stimulate his being to a play of general and specific plastic fantasies. (We know very little about the mechanisms of this play, but we are absolutely certain that it exists and even manages the artist’s creative process to a great extent.) This time, Krstić offers us sweets executed as spatial objects, ice–creams as pseudo–reliefs, fruit and something else as paintings.
In his former works, exhibited in the Belgrade Cultural Center gallery in 2001, this obsession with objects was suggested in paintings where parts of the painted portraits were presented in the form of pseudo–collages – the human quality was lost and they were turned into objects as such. Now, this fascination acquires its full significance in the creation of direct simulacrums of certain objects, different types of cakes, petits–fours, mignons, so convincing that only a slight additional technical perfection (which, I suspect, the author avoids on purpose) would make them fit for the display case of a large candy–shop as usual attractive replacements for real, perishable originals. Presented in such a way, they have a strictly utilitarian role. However, when a serious artist treats the matter, we have to look for other aspects of his engagement. First of all, observe in his fascination with objects a general inclination of modern art towards a new relationship to the current visual reality, whereby its majesty the object, particularly the one industrially manufactured, acquires a specific role. In pop art it reached the horizon of the consumer society apologetic as its absolute exponent, but even before and especially after the movement, freed from the bondage of the still–life motif, it was endowed unusual roles and meanings through artists’ personal visual poetics.
Fortunately, from an anthropological viewpoint, the making of object simulacrums, when not initiated with such a profane end as the above example of candy–shop display windows, can be related to one of the numerous kinds of magical needs,. For example, people living on the Polynesian islands where American planes used to land during the Second World War made model–simulacrums of those flying machines: they believed that they brought heavenly messages and small gifts, and wanted to summon them back. There are numerous other examples among the exhibits in Dubuffet’s Museum of Art Brut in Lausanne.
Of course, a modern educated man, with a presumed measure of intellectual skepticism, does not have the same primary motivation as the primitive world of Dubuffet’s “patients” or natives with their practice of sympathetic magic (according to James Frazer). But it can be assumed that underneath the rationally explainable layer of motivations (visual fascination) there could be a smoldering presentiment of a magical capturing, and possession, of an object, the object imitated as an echo of the collective unconscious. Then, as in the case of our artist, the cooperation of these two elements is manifested in the making of recognizable objects, but also as a contribution to the current civilizational and artistic state of the art and as a moment related to a personal creative craving. As for the motivation originating from the sphere of the collective unconscious, one should openly say that there is no rational way to define the participation of certain moments, such as the individual or collective unconscious, archetypal representations and symbolic meaning, in the creative process.
However, groups of other recent works of Velizar Krstić prove that he is not engaged in a simple, groundless, even unconsciously motivated, play with simulacrums. Let us mention here the construction of certain boards which recall through pseudo–reliefs the type of bulletin–boards that add to the form and colour of their advertised objects a third dimension reduced to relief. Krstić places different types of ice–cream on sticks on such boards–relief paintings. Even without the inscriptions of verbal advertisement of a certain brand or type of ice–cream, there is something related to the object that philosophers could call ontological doubling. Since Krstić’s objects are already simulacrums of the former utilitarian simulacrums, they can be accepted as original billboards seen in many places, but also as works of plastic art, different from those artifacts mentioned before. They acquire the status of artworks by means of seemingly unimportant formal pictorial interventions and a specific layering of colour, both on the background and on the relief representation of the object. The functional change of dimensions and the planned place where the object will be exhibited in the future (gallery or private ambience) lead to such semantic shifts which allow a work to be treated as artwork according to the currently valid standards, and we can discern in it the plastic formulation of the author’s humorous, critical, warning, or other, relation to the current visible manifestations of our everyday environment.
In the next group of Krstić’s recent works comprises those that reveal the artist’s fascination with the matter. When they represent fragments of objects, and when the author imitates on their relief surfaces tissues of different fruits or fish scales, he performs a much more complex operation than a purely mechanical and pointless production of imitations. His endeavor could be compared to some essential elements of the unsurpassed poetics of Gaston Bachlerad who showed us that the old and once the only system of knowing the world, the system founded on empiric and individual experience, is not dead, but could be creatively used in combination with a system brought about by scientific and cognitive developments, under the blessings of philosophy. Instead of words, Bachelard’s operative “tools”, Krstić uses visual and tactile qualities in order to develop and put into practice Bachelard’s formula for understanding the world: empirical experience – personal experience – broad general knowledge – philosophical predilections as creative and synthesizing wisdom. A painter, as talented and inquisitive as Krstić, has all this at his disposal, provided that the item “general knowledge” includes the entire spectrum of knowledge and ability to use the area of painterly phenomenology and technique.
This sphere, dominated with a particular cognizance of the world of objects and matter, is related to the sphere of big oil paintings dedicated to various kinds of fruit, where the author’s expression is dominant; of course, not in an emphasized pictorial and phenomenological–technical way, i.e. through an underlined stroke–colour interaction. It lies primarily in the intentional layer of the meaning of artistic creation, while as a phenomenon it is manifested through a particular type of realistic representation. The desire to express a predominantly personal experience of this fascination with object is closely related to significant innovations of modern art, such as the assembling of a number of identical objects or augmentation of their dimensions. This is an effective principle of moving the realistically naturalistic moment into a different stratum of meaning, which comprises a specific painterly procedure in Krstić’s works. Although close to realism, the procedure does not have the objectivistic fanaticism of naturalism or academic realism, not even in their most beautiful issues, such as Carravagio’s early still–lifes or the same motifs with Katarina Ivanović. Instead of an effective illusionistic precision achieved through “blended strokes”, Krstić’s works possess a pictorial sensitivity expressed by “lumps” of the paint matter, like Chardin’s, accompanied by the robustness that modern art requires. The final issue is an impressively explicit object reality of fruit and its appropriate struggle against everyday banality. The raising of the representation towards a “higher” expressive and symbolic level is helped by another, subsequently inserted element –graphic additions of numbers related to certain dates. Directly connected to this are the horizontal and vertical lines, drawn in bright colours and with the point of intersection placed eccentrically in relation to the surface of the painting. And so, in the overall hidden order of semantic definitions, a possible explanation appears as the representation of an oversized box with different kinds of fruit (candied?), a box that is usually bought as present, with a hinted ribbon that binds the gift and the date related to the person the present is hypothetically meant for. The inscribed date also implies that the choice of fruit is linked to the psychological profile of the given person.
Krstić’s fascination with object–world and the most alluring exponents of that world ramifies into several, sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent, directions. With each of them the author places before us specific semantic–aesthetic–visual riddles, and for himself a challenge to prepare the riddles by fully activating his own pictorial–poetic and intuitive–speculative abilities.