MELANGE by Goran Dacev
€10.00
MELANGE by Goran Dacev
€10.00
A collection of short comics- some in English, some in Macedonian + illustrations and notes.
64 pages, released in 2007- last copies
"Gorand is the artistic name of Goran Dacev, and the anthology of the transitional drawing narrative in Macedonia cannot even be imagined without his comics. His approach is offensive, a Napoleon Bonaparte with an amazingly erotic and penetrating strategy. But, unlike the classicist emperor, Gorand plunges in the realm of the invisible, in the intimate relations of the unpredictable and frightening world, in the horror of the alienated psychedelic labyrinths of the secret entities constituting that depth of life- the source of truly great art.
"Welcome to my nightmare!" is Gorand's cordial invitation to his passionate chambers of consciousness- "You might like it..."- he continues, from his hidden source of creativity in life. The plain cruel life operating as a constant inspiration for the native expressionist the paradoxical tenant of Gorand's complex subconscious. The expressionist draws sensations from the underworld. He comes up with startling novelties, he allures and attacks. But the old alert ratio placed in quite a favorable position within Gorand's artistic personality quickly deals with this beastly exaltation. It is training worthy of great masters. The creature so disturbed becomes an estimated part of the plan, and the frantic expressionist, the scrupulous and systematic worker, obediently fulfilling the grueling and extensive demands of Gorand, becomes the king and ultimate aesthetic illuminator of his own space within his creative conscience.
It is, in fact, the craft that Gorand treats as true alchemy. Renoir once said "Art is a craft". I would rephrase it is: a mystic craft with its own prehistory and purpose. It recalls the craft with which God created the universe. The craft of dedication and inconceivability- as magic itself becomes a phenomenon, so life becomes art. That is the craft we are dealing with here. And his stylistic references go deep in the abyss of the past: from Chester Brown and Art Spiegelman to Robert Crumb and Otto Dix, from George Grosz and Marc Chagall to Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, an entire crazy history of art, as incredible and phantasmagoric as it is engaged and metaphorical. In fact, the operational networks within which Gorand's aesthetic and ethical ideology moves about are enormous. Even though it seems narrow and claustrophobic at first, it is yet another crafty proceeding, this time taken from Kafka.
As any good alchemist of the artistic creativity, however, Gorand also knows how to bring the great artistic synthesis to its culminating crescendo, to that specific essential catharsis. And Gorand performs all these exhausting and seemingly impossible acts with no pragmatic reason. Absurdly and out of sheer love. Something so pointless and incredible, something impenetrable and disturbing for the common sense, something that can in no way be determined or destroyed, something such as art or life or at least the spiritual from that complex and incomprehensible puzzle we experience as existence.
So Gorand comes quietly, aware of the difficult task providence has set before him and moves into legend with all the glamour created on the magnitude of the finished work. With al those creepy and merry adventures, with all the degenerics and heroes, systems and revolutions in his memory. With all the memories of the visible and the invisible that Gorand so devotedly marks with his drawing quill." (Aleksandar Stankovski)
