Zoran Music - Fascination of Painting

…“This exhibition is neither the result of the enjoyable arbitrariness of the professional aesthetes, nor is it influenced by a dealer or gallery owner. For the first time, a music exhibition shows the view of 21 European collectors on the work of Zoran Music according to the motto „we show the best of our collections“…

…“It is also new that the artist himself is quoted by personal notes and statements on individual works and groups of works“…

…“If you want to understand the work of Zoran Music, you also have to deal with the question – where does Zoran Music come from? ….. What influence did his birth have in what fateful space we call Central Europe?“ …

…“There is a fascination with this work, which must be worked on. Whoever does not engage in the personality of the Master and his history will not find access to his world…“

…“The birthplace of Gorizia was still part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They spoke Slovenian, German and Italian.

To give an idea of the mythical-historical concept of Central Europe, let us take a look at the city of Gorizia/Gorizia/Gorica. It is a city that cannot be defined ethnically or historically: metropolis once a county to which both the blessed Collio belonged, as well as the valleys of today’s East Tyrol. Gorizia bordered on the Republic of Venice, was culturally connected to the lagoon city, but politically hostile. On the one hand the house of Austria, heritage of the Counts of Gorizia, on the other the Venetians in their star-shaped fortress Palmanova. Due to the mixed Italian-Friulan-Slavic population, he has become the painter of that mythical continent, which we call Central Europe. The motifs of the art field of Veneto and Dalmatia and the aesthetics of the Byzantine tradition of these eastern areas formed the basis of his art. And finally, fate, which can be summed up in a single word. DACHAU.“

… „Music paints a requiem on human civilization, whether in serene Paris, whether in the Karst or on its Altane in Venice“…

…“Music was a respectful figure, nothing could shake him any more: he had been looking death in the eye every day for months.

Music allowed death and death into the picture. She experienced the great closeness of death—music, not in the provocative tickle of Russian roulette, which makes death a calculable risk to a social game, but in existential experience. To be more precise, he had looked into the eyes of thousands of corpses, piled up in the snow like firewood to hills in front of the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp. If a stack was burned, came the next delivery. Music drew these mounds of corpses, secretly, if he could find a piece of paper…“

Zoran Music survived.

When he returned to Venice, he wrote in the catalogue of the Naviglio Gallery:

„Finally the great light, finally the sun, infinite sky to the low horizon of the lagoon, all this belongs to me, here I can breathe freely… Is it really true that no one is monitoring me? Is it reality that I am free to paint?“

… „From a few sentences speaks the happiness of a person who has lived in a world beyond all imaginations, in a world where DEATH was „normal“, where the horror was everyday life“…

From then on, Music looked at nature from this point of view. The lovely hills of Tuscany seemed to him like needlessly concealed corpse mounds, heaps of skeletons. And again and again the silent cry from the open mouths of the dead came to him: „We are not the last, non siamo gli ultimi…“ Until his own death, the artist will never stop articulating this cry in his paintings…

… Decades after the real-life horror images, the night-time faces of the deadly eclipse have caught up with the painter.

And yet, Zoran Music rested unwaveringly in itself. Where did he draw his strength of soul, I have often wondered. Perhaps he had become strong because he had seen many deaths in his life and therefore many deaths had died in advance. Perhaps he was similar to Dostoyevsky, who had been arrested as a revolutionary-inspired young poet and, wrapped in dead clothes, stood in front of an execution squad. A sham execution. Then the pardon was read to him and the verdict: exile to Siberia. Under this impression he became a prophet among Russian poets… Zoran Music became a prophet of Central Europe……