This review first appeared in Italian in Osservatorio balcani caucaso transeuropa on 01/10/2025, https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/Areas/Bosnia-Herzegovina/La-pittura-di-Ratko-Lalic-una-piccola-arca-di-Noe-235410 . English translation by Pina Piccolo. The cover image is a photo of Ratko Lalić’s painting, Zapis 1, 2019, 100x100cm, acrylic on canvas.
I am not writing this article about Ratko Lalić spurred by narrow patriotic motives, nor am I moved – as they say around here– by nationalistic urges. I picture it as a small tribute to one of the few Serbian and Yugoslavian artists who have always remained faithful to their beliefs from their first steps to their last ones in the world of painting. And a fragmented tribute it is, anything but a chronological one.
At the opening of the large retrospective (1972-2013) of Ratko Lalić’s work at the gallery “Cvijeta Zuzorić” in Belgrade, Đorđe Kadijević’s introductory comments were not at all academic, but, rather, characterized by spontaneity. In seven, eight minutes – the length of his speech on Lalić’s painting – Đorđe Kadijević, director, screenwriter and passionate art connoisseur, eighty years old at the time, delivered a most profound lecture, just the right length for thinking minds to grasp the words of an intelligent and competent commentator.
He spoke of Lalić using basic language: he defined him as the painter par excellence, a painter who, at the beginning of his career, was able to follow the dominant artistic currents, without ever giving up his large female nudes. Though close to Cézanne in spirit, his painting was not weighed down by the legacy of his predecessors, indeed (“colour, alone, can express everything”), so much so that in Lalić’s paintings even the color black is full of concealed chromatic intensity, hiding shades of carmine red.
Finally, Kadijević reminded the audience that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, when, in a world flooded with videos, installations and performances (at which point, the wise old man started to pull his hair out!) many began to consider painting an anachronistic phenomenon, but Lalić remained unwavering on his path. “Painting will never be out of touch with the times!”
I don’t remember exactly when, in the late 1970s (or maybe early 1980s?), Lalić built a spacious artist studio in his home village, near Visoko, on the bank of the Bosna River. I do remember that almost no day went by without my father Velimir ending his retiree’s stroll by stopping at Ratko’s studio. My mother was concerned: “Maybe you’re disturbing him, bothering him?” “Not at all!” my father would reply. (At the time, he wrote enthusiastically about Lalić’s exhibitions.)
Later on, first as a student, then as a young professor, I went with my father to visit Lalić’s studio several times. On the easels were paintings in progress, compositions of impressive dimensions, in which plants, gardens, fields, stubble, sheaves, clods, nests, stones and, of course, birds told, in their silent language, the beauty, but also the melancholy of existence.
During one of these visits – here my memory does not fail me, I was also reminded of this by some authors [1] of the texts collected in the monograph Ratko Lalić – slikar neprekinutog kontinuiteta [Ratko Lalić – painter of uninterrupted continuity] – leaning against a wall of the studio, I saw a female nude lying on the ground. It was one of those paintings whose sinister, rough, and therefore questionable, “beauty” makes collectors reluctant to take it home (I thought at the time). As also highlighted by Kadijević in 2013, the “robust” female nudes of the first period of artist’s evolution are a metaphor for Nature, the harbinger of a continuous dialogue between the painter and the natural world.
Having abandoned the nude as a subject, Lalić focused his painting on Nature as a miracle of life-giving forces, Nature and nothing else, as though the human figure (let alone urban life!) had disappeared from the painter’s field of vision.
Though he never explicitly stated so, he observed nature with the obsession of an artist who believed, that the entity of the world’s creator – be it God, Energy or Chaos – was completely irrelevant when it comes to the mystery of the world. Therefore, artists, as human beings with all their inner questions and doubts, must humbly bow to Nature.
It is no coincidence that Dragan Jovanović Danilov, the poet and essayist, defined Lalić as a painter of “an expanded romanticism, which aspires to romanticize the world again, bringing us back to the primordial energy of being”.
Director Živojin Pavlović was also attracted to Lalić’s painting. “Ratko Lalić’s canvases don’t seem to be shaped by the human spirit, but by nature itself. This is also why his painting is situated in the realm of amorphism. In it, everything is ephemeral – a blade of grass, a branch, a waving leaf, the shadow of a tree lying on a clod of dirt, the pale light that illuminates the bare stones…”
In his essay Spoznaja samog sebe [Knowing Oneself], Lalić talks about childhood, seeing it as the source of his “dialogue with nature”, as his teacher, the painter Stojan Ćelić, defined it in 1988.
Lalić says that as a boy, he built “a little Noah’s ark, a wooden boat.” on the river bank. “I sailed my ark to touch the mornings, the days, the seasons, in search of my own light.”
Later, as an old man, he again addressed the topic of existence, describing his painting workshop: “Every day I talk in front of the easel, in the small courtyard in front of my atelier at the Old Fair, in Orašac, where I have a garden and a vegetable garden, among memories and images of my homeland, on the banks of the Bosna River, as I walk through the streets of Belgrade […] My painting is a long visual biographical statement about nature. It was born from my own, internal inclination, removed from reality. Humans carry within themselves some images since childhood, they live with them and draw as well as emanate creative energy from them. I love simplicity. This is my perception of the world, my artistic aesthetics”.
To avoid spoiling this commemorative article by uttering the word whose meaning prompted Lalić to leave Sarajevo and his studio near Visoko, I will limit myself to stating that he continued his artistic activity in Belgrade. Without ever stopping. And that he was not one of those painters capable of “imposing themselves” on the market by pushing their way through with their elbows rather than with a brush, an easel and a palette.
Ratko Lalic: Zapis 2, 2017.g, 140x140cm, acryilic on canvas, photo by © Valdimir Lalić.
This is confirmed by the fact that the news of Lalić’s death, briefly reported by Radio and Television of Serbia and a portal in Visoko, was picked up only by the SRNA news agency and the Belgrade daily Večernje novosti . As one admirer of Lalić’s art claims, in any other country, the media would be competing with each other in publishing comments, images and statements by the painter about his artistic beliefs.
It is said that the media has paid more, albeit belated, attention to Lalić’s work only because of the words of praise pronounced by Emir Kusturica because the director dedicated a house to Lalić and his art in Drvengrad, and at the beginning of 2024, organized a retrospective of his works in the “Petar Lubarda” gallery in Višegrad as part of the Kustendorf festival.
Among those who were shocked by Belgrade’s deafness to the sad news, Milan Milinković, a collector and connoisseur of Lalić’s art. He vented his dismay by saying that not only are all the great painters who marked Belgrade’s artistic life gone, but “there is hardly anyone left to whom the news of Lalić’s death can be reported.”
Rather than conclude my review with this gloomy consideration, I propose we reflect on these words left by the beloved painter:
“I have bought a plot of land and have become a gardener. So I can closely observe the cycles of nature, waiting for the ripening, just as Monet observed and painted the cathedral at different times of the day and seasons. I paint, Lubarda used to say, like a farmer: I prepare the ground, I plough it and fertilise it, I sow and wait for the fruit. My painting was also born in this context. The word ‘farmer’ should be pronounced with respect, and not with cynicism, as happens in our parts. Here when you say ‘farmer’ you think of a primitive person, a backward, stupid man. That’s how we have all ended in this predicament. Farmers, on the other hand, are wise and perceptive […] As Joan Miró said, strength comes from the feet. This contact with the earth constitutes an important link with life. When Miró arrived in France from Spain he brought in his suitcase various herbs, fragrances, touches…”.
Please view this video that traces the Lalić retrospective held in 2013 at the gallery “Cvijeta Zuzorić”.
No words, just music and images.
[1] Edited by Sava Stepanov; publisher Cicero, Belgrade, 2010
Ratko Lalić was born on 6 February 1944 in Dolipolje, near Visoko, Bosnia Herzegovina. He attended the School of Applied Arts in Sarajevo and then the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where in 1975 he also completed postgraduate studies with Professor Stojan Ćelić. He taught drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cetinje in 1992, and since 1994 he worked at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. He also taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Banja Luka.
He has held 73 solo exhibitions, participating in almost 250 group exhibitions throughout the former Yugoslavia (Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje, Sarajevo, Nikšić, Sombor, Zagreb, Mostar, Zrenjanin, Dubrovnik, Budva, Banja Luka, Novi Sad, Užice, Niš…) and abroad (Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Italy, Sweden, France, Egypt, India, Romania, Bulgaria, Germany).
He has received numerous awards, including the Rista and Beta Vukanović Fund award by the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, the October Award of the City of Belgrade for “student, artistic and scientific commitment”, the “6 April” award established by the City of Sarajevo, the painting award at the October Salon in Belgrade in 1975, the award g by the Sarajevo City Museum at the exhibition “Colleguim artisticum ’81”, the award for painting at the 8th exhibition of the Union of Associations of Visual Artists of Yugoslavia (SULUJ) in Skopje. The University of Arts in Belgrade awarded him with a prize for his extraordinary merits and contribution to the development of the Faculty of Applied Arts and the entire University.
