Corbeau, 2008

Vladimir Velickovic   Best sellers Emerging artists

Vladimir Velickovic once confided us that, from his Eastern European culture, he would have inherited a certain tendency to want to say too much in one go and that the critical look he takes at each of his works is essentially to reduce it to the essential, to eliminate what he calls "the anecdotal". From this point of view, "Corbeau" is one of the artist greatest successes and presents a brilliant achievement of what he seeks to express and the means he uses to perform it.

The canvas is signed on and dated on the back, but the front also shows several of its usual signatures: the presence of a sign of danger with a death's head, a hole in the ground around which crows gravitate, a sky of soot peaked through by glows of fire. The setting being planted, comes the main subject : the raven and the pole on which it is perched. Is this pole really in the foreground, or does its disproportionate size show just how important it is in the scene, much as size defines the hierarchy of characters in medieval painting? We opt for the second solution because the tiny red reflection on the raven's plumage can only be explained by the proximity of the latter with the fire. The post is painted at a minimal level. Only the "useful" part, the one that supports the bird is detailed.

The base is just sketched. The drawing is a concept and when what it wants to mean is acquired, there is no need to develop it. In other works the fence wire that delimits the dangerous space is replaced by a wire netting that hatches the image and gives it its dynamism. Nothing of the sort here, the broken stay of the post floating in the wind is enough to confer this dynamism while whisking the scene. It is also mark of extreme desolation. A bit like shutters flapping in the wind are symbolic of an abandoned house. As for the raven it imposes itself in the image by the strong chromatic contrast which detaches it from its environment. But the work conceals an extra dimension by the representation, erased at the three-quarters but still present, of a ladder, probable vestige of an earlier version whose the artist did not want to completely remove the trace.

A ladder is above all a construction materializing the division of a distance in regular degrees. It is therefore a tool whose realization can only be attributed to reflection. The ladder here induces a human presence because it is characteristic of his intelligence. We can also note that in Western tradition the ladder is often linked to a gallows' presence and is a recurring element of the representation of Calvary. As a result, it constitutes here for us an essential cognitive element of the painting. The scorched earth, the glows of fire, the damaged fence, the presence of the crows, birds of the mass graves, all of this has probably the man for origin. The raven, an opportunistic bird, is just taking advantage of this tragedy. Nothing suggests the time when the facts occur but for the raven, whatever that time, deleting its ecosystem has never been on the agenda.