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Welcoming the Two Faced Rider: Paintings by Ilija Bosilj Bašičević
There is a sea change taking place within the field of Art Brut today. The boundaries are expanding through sheer necessity, no longer solely bound by the collecting preferences and theories of Jean Dubuffet’s time. By being more inclusive, the concept of Art Brut has become relevant to contemporary times and has saved itself from being merely a well-preserved artifact. One of the walls beginning to crumble is the outmoded idea of ‘naïve art,’ a title which belittles the sagacity of the artists and distances the work itself from being taken seriously in the art world. For a long time Ilija Bašičević’s work was bundled in the ‘naïve’ ghetto when in fact his ideas and concerns, his world-building, were made in deliberate reaction to totalitarianism and displacement. Many of these factors are cogently described and discussed in Jane Kallir’s essay in this catalog. The films of Frederico Fellini come to mind. The master film-maker was able to hide huge ideas about humanity, repression, fascism, love, hate, beauty, and the surreal juxtapositions of people and personalities in the mundane world behind a storyteller’s visions of dark whimsicality, irony and sublime artmaking. I feel the work of Ilija reaches for many of the same golden rings. Rather than allowing his work to be mired in a solipsistic personal mythology, he instead opens his life up to feed our own mythologies as well. His allegories become universal. We sense his basic humanism behind his jewel-like compositions. We know his circuses and his ambivalently moral begins from other worlds. They appear and reappear in every world cultures’ dreamscapes.