A Wound In The Mountain

The new series of paintings – Željava represents a inovation in Slobodan Vidović’s artistic research. Here he represent the large military base, or rather an airport, which was built in the heart of the mountain, in its very bowels. In the Plješevica mountain, on the border of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, in the immediate vicinity of Bihać, a huge military underground complex was built that could accommodate a military aircraft squadron. The project cost, at the time, over 5 billion US dollars and was one of the biggest military secrets of the Yugoslavia. This colossal state project was realized at the height of the Cold War and, next to the underground bunker in Konjic, it is the most monumental project carried out in this area.

Today’s position gives us the opportunity to observe the history of the airport in different ways. Slobodan Vidović’s new seria of paintings is one of them. In an modest way, the series of pictures shows the state in which the airport nowdays. In these landscapes, painted whether monochromatic with a large dose of abstraction or gestural color, we see its devastated state today. The fact is that the airport was never used its fundamental purpose. It survived as a beautiful ruin – a wound in the mountain, but also as a monument to past turbulent times

from the catalogue preface Mladen Banjac