ARCHIVE OF THE SKY – Painting becomes wind, is the series of paintings on display and represents the artist’s inner vision: the perfect balance between the physical space of the sky and the natural world of stylized birds, which float in the sky until they dissolve into the wind. The sky becomes a metaphor for the infinite, for inner freedom, and for the search for an otherworldly, celestial meaning. The bird, a creature that belongs simultaneously to both earth and sky, becomes a mediator between the material and spiritual worlds, between the real and the imaginary.
Painting becomes wind. These works do not merely depict flight—they generate it. Against deep backgrounds of midnight blue, purple, and ocean blue, bodies of light emerge. They depict energy through rapid, long, and at times sharp brushstrokes, tracing the trajectories of zoomorphic beings as they traverse space. Yellow and gold explode like nuclei, while white sculpts them and makes them visible for a moment, before darkness reabsorbs them. The technique is gestural and textural. Color does not fill the space: drips, glazes, and scratches create vortices, currents, and implosions. In the painting Universo (130x100 cm, acrylics on canvas), everything arises from a central explosion—a big bang of light that pierces the black. In the other works, the subjects multiply, dance in flocks, spin in spirals, and the chase one another. Blue becomes both water and sky. Red becomes heat and blood. There is a constant tension between figuration and abstraction. The eye searches for the beak, the wing, the tail and immediately afterward loses the form when the material ceases to depict and begins to vibrate. These works speak of freedom, of migration, of transformation. Of that part of us that wants to break free from the weight and fly away. They are fragments of vital energy captured on canvas, moments suspended between chaos and harmony. The viewer does not merely look. They are swept away. And for an instant, they, too, feel the beating of wings.
Goran Cetkovic was born in 1975 in Kolašin. In 2000, he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, where he studied under Prof. Nikola Gvozdenović. He is a member of ULUCG. He lives and works in Sutomore. He has exhibited in numerous group shows both in his home country and abroad; he has served on the jury for the art program of the Herceg Novi Winter Salon as well as for the Barski ljetopis art festival; he won the annual award from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje and the “Spinnaker” Gallery at the senior students’ exhibition; the 2016 “Milunović, Stijović, Lubarda” Painting Award from the Association of Visual Artists of Montenegro, and the 2017 Tesla Foundation USA Plaque in Belgrade.