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KIRO URDIN PLANETARISM MOVEMENT

1985-2020

Kiro Urdin e-mail: planetarism@gmail.com Tel: +32 475 82 30 93 Web: www.kirourdin.info PLANETARISM MOVEMENT Fevruary, 2020

Publisher ARTPREMIUM 19 Boulevard Malesherbes - 75008 Paris Tel: +33 1 55 27 36 56 - info@artpremium.com www.artpremium.com Publisher: Director: Eric Bonici Chief Editor: Corinne Timsit Translation into English and Proofreading: Graham Reid and Margaret-Peggy Reid Zorica Teofilova Vladimir Ristevski Graphic Design: Boris Semov Printed by: BRANKO GAPO, Skopje www.brankogapo.com 1000 copies ISBN: 2492-9395

Knokke, Belgium

he idea of Planetarism was born by accident.

After all, one of my aphorisms “One point everywhere, all the points in one” made me think about it. Then came “One art in all arts, all the arts in one.” In fact, even from the outset I imagined Planetarism as a multimedia project. The painting Planetarium was created during my journey around the world between 1996 and 1997. On this journey I was accompanied by a film crew from MRT (Macedonian Radio Television) and a photographer whose photographs later served as an authentic document in the monograph dedicated to the creation of the painting. Afterwards, the idea of Planetarism continued to spread. Initially this project was developed in the field of painting, film, video, photography, which later expanded to a ballet performance with the same name, followed by a book of poetry and several books with aphorisms. It can freely be said that the idea outgrew itself. But is there a boundary between the arts, whether they are called painting, sculpture, music, film, video, ballet, literature or design? Painting equals colours, music equals sound, film and video are moving images, sculpture adds the third dimension, ballet melts the boundary between body and spirit, and literature through its words can turn the author or reader into a point, time, space or nothing. There is also design which simplifies the form so as for it to be noticeable at first glance, and possibly later be experienced in a different way. Or all these arts might be an axis composed of several parts that can be understood, grow, enrich… Thus, the performance of the ballet dancer reminds us of a bird’s flight, the spasm on the face of an unknown actor can freeze time, and the cold blue light that fills the interior of a night club can cause shivers in the look of a lonely wanderer sitting in the corner of that bar, or some thought might remind us that Confucius understood so well the human vanity as if he had lived for centuries. As a consolation let’s remember that in today’s world nothing is normal, unless you are crazy, and some say that art and artists are the closest sisters to craziness. It was in this way that Planetarism was created. Kiro Urdin

PLANETARIUM (1996/97) is the first painting in human history to be worked on all over the world

PLANETARISM MOVEMENT One point, everywhere, everything in one point.

One art in every art, every art in one art.

Paintings Film Video Photography Music Literature Ballet Design Photography

ave painters already decided on the object to paint before they begin to work? A large majority of Western artists have given ‘yes’ as their answer until quite recently. Furthermore, they say they have even planned how to paint at the stage of production, with a possible idea of the colour and composition to be adopted. However, it seems that such a usual procedure is not always taken in the case of Kiro Urdin. This is why I have brought up the subject. See, for instance, the book of Urdin’s paintings that was published in l992 by Art International Publishers. Paris: I think that more than half of those works can be categorized as works for which he has not decided on object or style before beginning. The most representative example of the type is a work entitled Piano Bar which has an atmosphere as if all the colours of paints are pressed out from a tube to writhe on the whole space of canvas. While this painting certainly conveys its subject’s mood, the work is simultaneously so filled with the charm attained by the movement of colours itself as to be safely given another title. A similar argument can be applied to such instances as Le monde d’artisie and Reincarnation. Though not necessarily intending to say that every painting by Urdin has been produced in this way, I am sure that, as his basic manner of painting, colour expression comes first. A form then follows the colour in many cases of his work. He at least is not particular about form. Kiro Urdin is an advanced Macedonian painter who has instinctively and constitutionally practised the intention of today’s painters, those who have endeavoured to be liberated from formalism – the historical norm in Western Modern Painting. Our familiarity with this painter will not need to be explained any further: he does not appear to be a ‘fauve’ or an expressionist. That is no reason, though, why I should forcedly insist that Urdin is an Eastern painter. We Eastern people have a flexible cultural environment in which we originally have an accepted idea that art is not primarily made out of subject or form, and that the Universe can be felt even from a dot on a blank space. Shinich Segi, Tokyo, 1994

PAINTER, PHOTOGRAPHER, SCULPTOR, POET, FILM-MAKER, WRITER... KIRO URDIN IS TOTAL ARTIST ARTPREMIUM MAGAZINE spring/summer 2016, Paris

METAMORPHOSIS OF THE POINT

without being regularly bypassed by an established figuration. He testifies the matter in formation cultivated by his thoughts and/or other thoughts.

t is forbidden to grow old. It is allowed to live! This could describe the endless journey of events in the life and complete work of Kiro Urdin’s vast and multidisciplinary work. Nourished with a passionate sap, he is eager to exchange all forms of existence and emotions to excel with authenticity in painting, drawing, sculpture, writing, cinema, and other media of expression. His acute perception of vibrations, ema nates from the din of human’s many personalities, guide his work. He denudes both with force and sensitivity all the facets of living beings, men or animals, to reveal the initial integrity of the created Being.

Generations have preceded him, and the technological world has caught up with him, but his affinity for ethnics is accompanying his photography in Africa as well as his remarkable films fulfilled with humanity that won multiple international film festivals in the independent films category. Each of his movies, whether they were about humans or wild animals in Africa, proclaims the common thread of the race for life and the familiarity of our mortality.

“Energy” is his favorite word, as it continually declaims to communicate any form born of his inspiration. Kiro is a man free of limit, definition, shape, and substance. When he talks about the movement from which he gave birth: Planetarium, he talks about the point. A point, an origin of life, of a world and of a universe that will limitlessly be linked to one another. He absorbs space and spreads himself like a particle or wave generating matter or light. His painting is resounding, just like in the Kandinsky’s paintings; his forms and colors unveil the matter in formation in cosmic and sound space. The thought coming from the Origin of life conducts him and tells him about the genesis of forms and colors that he pours with accuracy. The blues, reds, yellows, and blacks vibrate

There is not and will never be a definition of what an artist is because every living being can create as he can think. But how would one think to evoke in perfect resonance the creative steps of matter and thought? Kiro Urdin shares with us in his immense and profound work, abundant and eloquent in images of existing, inaudible and invisible worlds of which he alone has access. He is our friend and an artist of a time, of one born from a point! Corinne Timsit Co-founder and Chief Editor of ArtPremium magazine

I am the threshold, if you are love, step over me.

SCULPTURES Sculpture is the third dimension of things. When surface wraps around itself, or when it ruffles, it turns into form. The wish to touch that form is fascinating.

Romena, bronze

Figure, bronze

TIME STATION

Everything can fit in a point: space, silence, light, time. Birth, time, death. But the point is time, which means it can live anywhere and everywhere. To be still, but also to be an ellipsis on the path of a star, a constellation, the cosmos, the Universe... As long as all is in it, it can become nothing. It can die. But, if a point can die, it also means it can be reborn, because it moves constantly. In its motion, it grows constantly, becoming the biggest, becoming the Universe. Therefore, it has to die again. In points. In a point. Multiplied into universes. Universes grown into a Universe. Universe – born in a point. Point transformed into the soul of time, so it can live in it. And because of that it wants to freeze in time, endlessly turning... around its imaginary axis.

Time Station, bronze, 410x150 cm

Horse and Imaginary Woman, bronze

The Winner, bronze

Dogon’s Message, bronze

MARBLE Tonight I wanted to whisper something to you before I reached the sea sand and the two women who were alone, tonight I wanted to tell you that the sea wanted me to be here next to the waves, to the sea sand, to the two women with two roses who were alone, and I to be alone without myself so that I become sand under their feet here in the blue waters of Carrara, and maybe the marble contained the secret of the emptiness in your eyes as if they knew about me before I was here, only I am neither sand nor water, but marble in the hands of Michelangelo.

Dogon Woman, bronze

Imaginary Woman, bronze, 50 x 52 cm

that of Kiro Urdin who has, for a long while forged a parrallel between life and art, since the story of his painting is an integral part of his life story, as the tempestuous energy deployed in his itinerary encompasses his eruptive and generous nature. Crazy about painting, with his truncated images as seedbeds for deflagrations and seismic jolts with sizzling juices, Kiro Urdin does not paint what he sees or believes he has perceived, but what he feels in his inner depths: the urgency of this diffuse wave, caught on the threshold of his consciousness, is instantly included in painting’s space in fragments, with an abrupt vehemence which he employs in a confessional mode, in order better to understand others.

KIRO URDIN

n an era notable for its fakery and self-serving hypocrisy, in which people fight in the name of doubtful ideologies, with the powers-that-be’s indifference, art remains as the last bastion of all resistances, the final refuge for freedom of mind, the melting pot in which are mingled the most outlandish dreams. It remains a place for appearance, where humanity’s ontological truthfulness is inscribed. But if, according to Nietzsche “truth is ugly”, it can also be conciliatory, corruscating, playful, snug, seditious or affecting, and when painting takes it over and transforms it, a new relief and another meaning appear, without necessarily cutting itself off from life.

On the margins of art for art’s sake, and of the quest for form for form’s sake, his vagabond forms in their permanent gestation are based on a continuous recourse to sensitive experience, plucked in the immediacy of its crystallisation. For him, moreover, human problems do not affect pictorial problems. The painting’s struc-

“I do not wish to separate art and life, wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, I know that at any time, in any circumstances they have the same meaning.” This creed reflects

Double Face, watercolour 55 x 75 cm

paint mankind’s misery, the derisory vanity of their conflicts, their psychological driftings, and neither does he uphold the social virtues. He lets himself be guided by the eloquence of situations, by the posture of the figures, equated with the affective impulses of his thinking, which painting integrates and modulates in his contrasting and dislocated layers, dotted with graphic curvings or asymmetrical suspended masses.

ture ordains. Its rhythms, its values, its global breathing space, its dosing of colours, its luminosity flattened, focalised or phosphorescent, its spine, are the objects of an articulation as frank as it is just, however obtained in the gestures’ runaway forces, subjected to deeply felt hazard, but based upon an enlightened mastery of the means deployed. A purely temperamental painter, shying away from programmed theories and opportunistic belongings, he acts directly on the canvas in the heat of the moment, embracing a wild body-to-body encounter, producing in turn uplifted sedimentations of an informal sort, anthropomorphic figures half-human half-animal, blurred portraits with a mask-like quality, sometimes indecisive thinkers, musicians, more plainly named but wrapped up in a diluted matter, which resonate with intimate feelings transfigured by the painter’s gesture.

To feel, to foreshadow and to provide explanations, without pinpointing specific places nor temporal information, that is the key to this voluntary language which intends to fix the climates of yesterday today or tomorrow: in a way a daily retching, truthful although entirely invented. Kiro Urdin, while always remaining aloof from a rationalism which never ceases to restrain us, lets his intuition speak so as to produce the flashes of his tumefied, iconography, reuniting heaven and earth, the sacred and the profane, the past, the present and the future, and simultaneously realism and abstraction,

However, despite the ever present existential approach, and despite his altruism, Kiro Urdin does not

Michael’s Soul, watercolour 55 x 75 cm

ing teaches him to perceive that which is invisible to his own eyes, that untouchable reality which only his eyes can provide with a meaning.

the clash of snares and the peace of lacunary beaches, through an osmosis sunny rather than dark. The forms reach the sources and the wellsprings within the forms, arbitrarily isolating a detail, outlining the irregular contours of a sculptural body, underlying the planes of a face, gathering up a maelstrom of freefalling units, tuned into the buried symbols which underline them, wrapped inside the vivacity of chromatic exchanges and of neighbouring linear installations, incorporating the surface’s homogeneity.

Refusing the turmoils of the anecdote and the phantasmatic repetitions, thanks to the concentration of his instinct, Urdin has deliberately decided to uncover the world through equivalences, at the heart of which, once the magma of reality has been decanted, there is to be seen a hidden reality, in which the lyricism of his vision is refined and ordained. An elliptical vision, which drives the referent to a simple pretext, the means of his organic metamorphoses.

Obviously, Kiro Urdin’s static or turbulent imagery, at first sight seems chiefly human and brotherly, before being introspective and ambiguous. It is not irredeemably grounded in torment, as a prolongation of Dostoyevskyan creatures, proclaiming anguish and doom, nor does it cultivate the interweavings of Freudian repressions, is not subject to the dogmas of realism, and does not espouse the narrative corrosive vocabulary of the New Figuration born in the 1960s, nor does it belong to the Free Figuration of the 1980s, unless it precedes it. Furthermore if it opens windows onto dreams or allows itself arrangements which momentarily forget the figure, it remains anchored in reality. But when it abolishes the subject, absorbs it within its nets or takes it apart, this writing expresses the emotional sweyings of a being who is profoundly anxious, but nonetheless geared to an avowed optimism and secure in an interior peace, rather than a radical inclination towards drama. Paint-

Certainly, the level of painfulness inherent in the strongly expressive works cannot be hidden by the desire to adhere to life in its totality. Reality is never rendered as an idyllic perception, for happiness is always a shattered mirror. And so, despite his hunger for happiness, he has also developed a typology in a tumultuous and hardened style, and to quote Elie Faure, talking about Soutine, “which is effortlessly transcended from the very fact of its reality, transposed through passion.” And so, this sublimated reality is enacted within the surpassing of the subject, inexorably planted in a fallow support, until it breaks out in a conglomerate overrun by indistinct shapes. And where one finds a lack of formulation, an emergence from the subconscious, that is where mystery and potential trouble creep in.

Picador, 1993, watercolour 80 x 120 cm

In this anti-classical concept of beauty, where the figure is removed from narration, there survives the enigma of the work, in which we can only distinguish light thanks to shadow’s progress. Everything is formulated in “the necessity”, as Giacometti explained, everything is admitted beyond the widespread flux of the flowering images, between the euphoria of imagining atmospheres and the difficulty in presenting them pictorially. But “Is joy not found in the subject one paints?” queried Rouault.

or Holder, around 1900 and which was consolidated, slightly later with “Die Brucke”, and the Viennese artists, and included, between 1910 and 1930, Soutine, Permeke and Rouault, without omitting the historical precursors Valdes Leal and Goya, relayed by Solana and after 1945, by the tenets of Cobra and their direct or peripheral inheritors. As a result of which, he is closer to that isolated and unloved (in our climates) art form, except for Spain and the southern nations, through its schematic and convulsive relationship with the human structure, and that firing up of the stroke which labours and dislocates beings in a demystifying impulse. However, there are several aspects in his nature which mark him out as quite different, notably, a less impulsive attack on the subject, an apparently less sensitive awareness, not so closely linked to the dramas of our time, a deliberately outlawed complacency towards the sordid; finally, a much less pronounced, systematic, flattening of the figures.Kiro’s world is neither cruel nor held up to ridicule, nor is it horrifying, but it is empty of concessions, of

And now, after outlining the broad strokes of his trajectory, and far from trying to include Kiro Urdin necessarily within a specific tendency, insofar as he is chary of labels and of overly reductive assimilations, his stylistic procedure is closer to the Expressionistic family, rather than to the realistic fibre in its usual acceptation. However, he does possess many points in common with Expressionism, that idiom rebelling against Impressionism, around van Gogh, Ensor, Munch, Nolde

Cannibal Sacrifice, 1993 watercolour 80 x 120 cm

Amazonian Mother, 1994, watercolour 55 x 75 cm

The Cannibal’s Love, 1993, watercolour 80 x 120 cm 56

Amazon Queen, 1993, watercolour 75 x 55 cm 57

Blue Dream, 1993, watercolour 55 x 70 cm

Cartier, 1993, watercolour 55 x 75 cm

Rugby Player, 1993, watercolour 75 x 55 cm

Feeling of Surprise, 1995 watercolour, 105 x 75 cm

Lyrical Take-off, 1995 watercolour, 150 x 100 cm

Illusion, 2010, watercolour 101 x 61 cm 62

Explorer, 2018, watercolour 55 x 37 cm 63

alone or in groups, reminders of faraway countries, the United States, Japan or Israel, and above all, those veils of matter and filtered light, which eat into the models, outrageously dilate or tighten them up, obliterating perspective, without mutilating their original identity.

sentimentalism, of miserabilism, of picturesqueness, of realism, and in no way does it strive for decorative effects. He does not play on the intimate register, artificial angers, nor the forgiving nod and wink. Paradoxically austere and flamboyant, grave and chaste, he imposes a crude but never despairing, vision, of destabilised mankind, approached within the enclosed perimeter which is his dwelling place. It is a world without artifice, which reflects the artist’s moral rectitude, because it cannot be otherwise. A world of truth, surrounded by plural sensations, which reveal remembered situations, partly consecutive to situations, recorded during his far-flung travels, or his daily activities. “Painting,” Urdin writes, “is for the discovery of truth. This notion of understanding is unique, impossible to retract.”

In watercolours, which he used for a long time with a chosen subtlety, accompanied by its swarm of cloudy transparencies, or in oils, which he prefers, with its broken pigmentations, hammered or slipped in, Kiro Urdin has not finished confronting his dream with reality, pursuing his absolute ideals. And yet, his vocation has been subject to many vicissitudes. Strumica, in Macedonia was his birth place, after the Second World War, in a middle class environment. He was the youngest of five children. His mother Makedonka, was a housewife, his father Mihail owned of an import-export business and also ran a hotel and restaurants in Skopje. Young Kiro had a happy childhood, did well in his studies and went to the university of Belgrade, where he obtained

This condensed and scattered work, combines the pieces of the puzzle offered to our knowing interpretation: worldly ladies, indeterminate landscapes, wild or domestic animals, princesses, unknown silhouettes

Document, 1996, watercolour 100 x 150 cm

generation to generation. He also carries within himself the scars of the warring jousts which tore his community apart, aggressions endured from Romans and Turks, demands by the Serbians, the Bulgarians and the Greeks, after which Macedonia was split into three territories: one in Greece, another in Bulgaria and the present Republic of Macedonia, dovetailed into ex-Yugoslavia. In fact, Kiro’s painting, perhaps unconsciously, exemplifies the displaced memory of that parcelling up imposed by fate in its repeated scatterings. For a rootless artist, the universe is not made up of the same landmarks. The instability of his parameters leads to a transgression of reality which can only browbeat and alter his practice.

a law degree. His taste for art, according to him comes from his mother, whereas his father, whose eldest son Kostadin was already a writer, and who detected a taste for art in Kiro, did not want another “Garcia Lorca at home”. But it was too late, one day Kiro was to become a painter, his inner conviction kept him along that path. From his native soil, he keeps and cherishes magnificent memories. We are all aware of how the abandoned country, the lost paradise of childhood, deeply nurture the conscience of the exile, be it voluntary or not. The artist who loses the taste of childhood loses his roots. His Parisian citizenship, based on a quarter of a century of living here, has not banished from Kiro Urdin’s heightened memory his sunfilled mountains, the fertile plains of the Vardar, the grandiose effigy of Alexander the Great, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet, the innumerable basilicas containing the most remarkable icons of the Balkans, the rites, dances and legends transmitted orally from

Once his studies were over, to which he later added a diploma as film director obtained in Paris in 1977, Kiro first chose a career in journalism from 1969 to 1970. Rich in possibilities, he remembers, he was offered the legal reporting, and while he experimented with the possibilities of caricature, for which he is very gifted, to

Communication, 1993, watercolour 72 x 105 cm

Micro Universe, 2005, acrylic, 150 x 110 cm

Blue Dream, 2012, watercolor, 55 x 40 cm

Man of The Green River, 2015, acrylic, 150 x 110 cm

Expirience, 2015, acrylic, 150 x 110 cm

tourists in a hurry, to undertake a few mercantile jobs and to attend classes at the Beaux-Arts. Little by little, having worn out the fragile bases of the Montmartre friendliness, internecine quarrels and the hard drinking touchiness in the surrounding bars, he broke off a life which was henceforth lacking in competitiveness, in order to seriously grapple with painting.

illustrate his articles, his passion for art was growing. In 1973, tiring of a situation with few opportunities for sublime drawings, he decided to settle in Paris. For him, the French capital “Is colour, colour is light, light is spirit”. The Pigalle metro station ratified his original contact with the City of Light, under a dark, heavy and damp sky. Although in his mind he carried legitimate but uncertain hopes, being totally penniless, he had to put up with drastic material conditions. The company of tramps being less poetic than in literature, a lucky chance meeting with a compatriot enabled him to find provisional lodgings, without water nor electricity, cold and frankly inhospitable, but he had no option. The days spent in Montmartre, Place du Tertre, in which the obsolete charm of Paris still operated, and friendships were formed, led him alongside his activities as portraitist for

A painter’s life, after spending time enclosed within a codified and protected space like that of the Butte, becomes another battle for creation and for survival. It is not enough to believe in one’s potential, it needs kindly fortune to smile on one. A Lebanese dealer, Robert Messara, gave Kiro the opportunity to put in an appearance in the circuit of Parisian galleries. The way was cleared but he still had to put up with an exiguous

Dialogue, 2019, watercolour 55 x 75 cm

which Kiro feels to be essential: watercolour. Its damp colours and its fleetingness, its backlighting and the inevitability of colours once applied, without forethought, acted as a springboard for the Macedonian, briefly mentioned above, until about 1980. On his gauzy backdrops, rapidly thrown on in a succession of irrevocable touches, there appear figures who are deliberately awkward in their frail envelopes, bathed in a radiant light. One of his commentators noted that his watercolours “are as dense as oil paintings”, while retaining their transparencies. Little by little, the vague outlines of faces and bodies enfolded in an intangible material are reinforced by linear underpinnings which strengthen the invisible structure, by sketching the hidden face of a personality, its distress, its difficulty of being, its fictitious serenity or its nostalgia.

lodging, 9 square metres, still in Montmartre. His works started to attract collectors and the uncertainty of his position faded. There was not yet wealth, but a certain security reassured and encouraged him. Not very keen on exhibitions, he was convinced that it would be dangerous to give in to influences, which is why he rarely attends them, the same with museums which might also have a pernicious influence on the artist. Bubbling over, with his determined face, his demonstrative gestures emphasising a rapid fire of conversation, and his skeptical irony, Kiro Urdin is in perpetual motion, but he does take time to note his admiration for Picasso, who absorbed and transformed everything, for Klee and the subtleties of his concerted shorthand, for van Gogh and his delirium of colours in the simplification of his warring forms. Let us go back a little while, to a period

Dialogue (detail), 2019, watercolour 55 x 75 cm

Elephant Man, 1989, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm

Communication, 1991, oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm

Finally, returning to oil paints for good, Kiro Urdin changed his approach. The means and techniques vary but his thematic remains identical. It renews with his humanity and his bestiary leaping from the elementary, to reconstitute itself within the intermingled arteries of a frittered substance, hemmed in by a myriad textures, of interlinked forms, widened, sinuous or shrunk, sometimes covered in inextricably graphic weavings, of intrinsic signals, bright or dark impacts, in a hubbub subject to its own laws of balance. In these interweavings of striped and mounted forms, whose pores breathe harmoniously, the centre of the canvas moves forwards or backwards, is demultiplied or rears up, providing this warp and weft with retinial vertigoes and other virtualities.

unfindable cartography – a term which is singularly apt for this unrepentant nomad – can be glimpsed, almost furtively, so many faces crossed out by graffiti and by strange grimaces, or bodies enclosed within a colourful soil, who sometimes seem to stand on the edges of a happily hallucinated world like Chaissac’s. From time to time, the model frees itself from the flood of signs and forms which enclose it, and becomes resolutely identifiable. Everywhere, in the luxuriance both assembled and split, of revealed ambivalences, there floats a double postulate. The first, like in For Ever, which shows bodies lined up vertically in an inverted position, beside a sort of disproportionate head with a narrow ending, plunged into the roughness of kneaded matter, there comes an anxious twitching, in which “anguish is unknotted in the pleasure of painting”. The second, like in Wall Street Impressions, or Play of Centaurs, in which seeps a holi-

Along this chain of strangled gills, of estuaries and archipelagoes close by, conceived in the manner of an

Model, 1988, oil on canvas, 100 x 135 cm

menacing eye, the deformed cheeks of a trumpet player, a voyeur’s perverse profile, or figures sitting or lying down, outlined by scribblings or nervy graphics. Within that abundance of proportions and of uninterrupted forms, no hiatus will contradict the compensatory understanding of fullness and void, of dissected planes and coagulating volumes. Everything seems to pledge allegiance and to retract, lean on and be confounded in a hail of showers, saturated with incandescent colours. But make no mistake, the electrical verve which runs over these shivering epiderms obeys an internal vigilant order, which instinctively regulates every uncalled for overflow. “Sensitivity is an order” Descartes reminds us. And therefore chance has no place here, nor the literary crosscurrents of Surrealism. A guarded freedom predominates, the gesture itself knows that freedom does not mean freedom to do just anything. Scribbles,

day atmosphere, made up of cheerful tonalities, between the candour of the content in space and the acceleration of joyously intoned salvoes, which distill the driven freedom of the tempo. On an adjacent side, France Masai Mara, or Japan, with its deeply spiritual overtones, made in 1998, are constituted in a balanced minimalism, governed by flights of separate rhythms and of cascading tufts, which metaphorically designate the sites involved, in a spirit of sacrifice attesting to a hard earned maturity. It must be clear by now that austerity and exuberance identify those effusive scores, sometimes punctuated by forms not easy to qualify, but generally under the impulse of an episodic figuration which we recognise. Anatomies and faces always appear piecemeal in the earth’s teeming summations, underlining an intrusive eyeball, an atrophied arm, a smirking mouth from which an indomitable tongue juts out, a bull’s

The Princess of the Caribbean, 1989, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm

of his thematics. Collectors, who had become faithful friends, such as Gerard Meulensteen, a canny watcher of contemporary art, at the origin of his intercontinental journey, and Danielle Bacardi, who instigated some exhibitions, provided him with unstinting support, and strengthened his confidence and his tenacity, by their interventions and their comments, Fernand Leger used to say “With me, there is no evolution but revolution.” This holds good for the finality of this ongoing, aware work. “All my paintings are different, emphasises the artist, emotion develops and changes daily.” And he adds: “A good figurative painting can be abstract, a good abstract painting can be figurative. I never think of representation. I am seeking something in painting which goes well beyond painting, something which I do

scratches, cuts, overwritings, scourings, superpositions, covering up, openings, all of which partake of the painting’s earthy life, lucidly but without calculation construct the spaces which underpin it. In this disciplined way, by the end of the race, colour is distributed in the virginity of its movement, but under the impulse of an organising thought process. An integral part of the composition like its brushstrokes, matter and the arm’s operative gesture, colours are sealed inside their fate. Provided with technical help, and imaginative resources, the bequest of Byzantine art, its flowery baroque, the nobility of its harmonies, its cupolae and its icons, soon to be assimilated into the tempered light of Mediterranean expression, opened Kiro’s eyes to other forms of thought, with a view to a renewal

Yellow Night, 1993, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm

without which nothing is viable. It is a leap into the unknown, whose future is unguessable. In that, Kiro’s commitment is close to that of St John of the Cross: “To go where you know not where, you must go to where you do not know”. And by projecting himself into the unknown, he brings out the reference at the heart of painting, the spirit of the matter and of the all-conquering colour. This approach of availability before the formalised and incarnate point of the canvas, its fictitious absence of initial interest for the manner in which the subject will be embodied, does not prevent him from providing his works with titles afterwards. Their particularities avoid unnecessary comments. Expectation, Scientific Time, Adultery, Guru, Woman in Red, Cannibal Mask, Yellow Night, and so many others, indicate

not yet know when I start painting, and which arrives unexpectedly, when I least expect it. It is this final note, beyond my control, which provides the canvas with its complete meaning.” In other words, it is “the controlled accident” which orchestrates the work’s influx. Kiro ignores the motif, because most of the time, if a leading idea mobilises him, it can combine with another one along the way, and reappear once more in a different mix, in the density of his layered units, front-facing, sideways or crooked. In this language, where form and foundation are twinned, the passage of feeling is the mainspring, the lever which provides all fusions, but it is accompanied by the basics of a well thought out craftsmanship, with a twist of suspense, of madness, of luck and of wit,

Othello, 1992, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm

his mental and geographical sources, and above all, the seismographic slant of his emotion.

justification, if they proceed from the heart of painting, Kiro transmits the intensity of his creative fervour.

One of Degas’s quips was to announce: “Some think the painting is finished when it is not even started!” For Kiro, a work is finished when he admits the impossibility of adding another element. However, beforehand, he has carried out an exhausting and fiery struggle with it, mixing the material, providing links and their opposites, inversions and retentions, painting fast, with different brushes and tools, with his hands and his feet, like the group Gutai, the canvas turned over, stretched or spread out on the floor, feverish and concentrated, awaiting “the mistake which will change everything.” On the wings of risk, in the betwixt and between, moving and haphazard, in which imagination and symbols are their only

Finally, recently his insatiable curiosity and his exploring appetite have taken him to five continents, so as to paint, in each country visited, the same immense canvas: 48 square metres, i.e. eight metres by three, split into two parts of 24 m2. Unrolled at each stop, sometimes placed on a stretcher, Kiro, overwhelmed by the prestigious nature of his environment, the millennial cultures and the unequalled riches of world heritage, has covered it as a symbol of his taking posession. Drunk with the centuries-old fragrances, the companionship of people from every race, face to face with temples, and with landscapes from the four corners of the earth, he translated his circumstantial emotions. For two and

Piano Bar, 1990, oil on canvas, 170 x 200 cm

was undertaken by Kiro, obstinately, almost devotedly, his canvas on his back, in all weathers, and employing frequently unusual means of transport, aiming only for infinity in his quest and for the blossoming of his serenity. He has brought back a synthesis haloed by memory and affect, woven from unattained dreams, and fulfilled hopes, whose recipient, in other words the canvas, was endlessly reworked as a dream of knowledge and of freedom finally materialised.

a half years, dealing with problems which would have been unsurmountable for most of us, he filled his fresco with the spoils of his remembered images in situ, and with the breath of his sensitive thoughts. From Skopje, cradle of all births, to the cannibals of Mindoro, from Cheops to the Pre-Columbian sites of Machu Picchu, from the Masais in Kenya to the Forbidden City of Beijing, from Jerusalem, where, on hearing of the birth of his daughter Donna, he kissed the tomb of Christ and immolated, through fire, a large piece of the canvas, in New York, Tokyo and in the great European capitals, he placed his long, mystical, journeying under the banner of love and of the search for his limits.

A hymn to happiness, an act of love, this work entitled Planetarium, “one point everywhere, everything in one point”, and condensed in a remarkable short movie, nowadays belongs to the company Neways Electronics International, in Holland, and decorates its entrance lobby with its blue background, an allusion to the

This exhausting journey, with thousands of episodes and repeated perils, on the scale of his lack of measure,

Wall Street Impresion, oil on canvas, 170 x 200 cm

contradictory fluxes in his sumptuous vital energy, at the service of a superior reality. After many turbulences, every exhibition adding a new step to his reputation, Kiro Urdin, like James Joyce, remains that tender and wild individualist, whose conquering oeuvre, refractory to fashions and to labels, resonates deep inside us, long afterwards.

cosmos, on which play the trances of his forms and of his signs like a promise of universal joy. It was a unique experience “a turning point in my life, an adventure out of the norm”, says Kiro. At this stage, no matter how far back the analysis proceeds, Kiro Urdin’s work is an affirmation of an authority without a decisive break. Of flesh and blood, it describes the man in filigree; solitude, melancholy, nostalgia, incommunicability, but who only aspires to light and to a peaceful world. And if it lingers in the unconscious of people and things, it has to do with

Gérard Xuriguera translation Ann Cremin, 1998

Dance of the Centaurs, 1992, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm

The Equator, 1998, oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm

FLOWER When I tell you that I love you you won’t be here any more, you’ll be another flower in another’s garden. If I don’t tell you that I love you I’ll be another’s flower in your garden. When I tell you that we love one another you’ll start to love my flower but you’ll start to grow in another’s garden.

The Man of the Future, 1989, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm

THRESHOLD I was born on the threshold of the door if you are love cross over me.

The Beginning of the World, 1997, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm

Maya Woman, 1997, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

PLANETARY MEMORY

When will we stop killing our planet? Do we not care about our children? Neo-capitalism, neo-liberalism and quasi-democracy have clouded our brains, and in that fog, we have forgotten our priorities. Probably the system of primitive and underdeveloped tribes is very human, ethical and moral, unlike the great developed civilizations which, as always in history, drown themselves in their own blood. Why don’t our buildings speak? Where does the secret to eternity hide? Are there still universal values or is everything in line with rapid technological development? Can we touch the stars? Yes, HE can do all of that through his works, and he is also trying to initiate a debate on all the questions raised above. We are talking about the pantheist and lover of painting, Kiro Urdin. Urdin is an author who

through a specific artistic perception To Kiro Urdin’s Planetarism Written by: Ana Frangovska, MA, curator

an we represent time? Can we touch the cosmos? Why not favorize the momentum now, why not celebrate diversity, why shouldn’t we be greedy, or be citizens of this world, and elevate the past, while striving for a better future? Would we agree to share our destiny with the homeless, so in an act of solidarity try to live such a life for at least one full day?

Blue Abstraction, 1997, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm

language, beginning his development in the mid-80s of the last century, achieved a remarkable leap forward towards defining expressionism, or if you prefer neoexpressionism, ranging from figurative to abstract expressionism, from expressionism with darker color gamut, to pure and intense colored fields or details in which a certain state of affairs that favors life in all its forms segments occurs. If expressionism was mainly concerned with actualizing the problematic reality in which we exist, whether by expressing the internal expression of antagonistic people or by the general formal organization of compositional wholeness with nervous strokes and distortions, then Urdin’s formal features are present, but does lack the dark side of the concept. He celebrates life in its every pore and every

constantly and consistently creates large and small canvases, drawings, graphics, illustrations. However, his ability to convey creative thought does not just end with the media of fine art, but it has its own extension in the field of inventive writing – he loves to write aphorisms, poetry, and narrations, essays, reviews; he continues in photography; film; the scenography; ballet; writing scripts; music etc... This wide-ranging panoptic of interests and actions contributes to a more censored approach to each art individually, but also to a greater power in conceptually uniting them all together. This is where the energy of planetarism is born, where universal values are reincarnated. Urdin is noted in Macedonian and world art history as a very important artistic figure who, with his visual

New York, 1991, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

painting” as a way of creating the world. Related to its nature and the philosophical reasoning of the world and cosmopolitanism, he selects key historical-civilization and artistic locations which in their own unique way should implement the centuries-old spiritual amalgam in the act of painting the canvas. As key points he chooses the Macedonian “St. Panteleimon” in Nerezi and the culturally and naturally rich Ohrid, followed by Paris, Bruges, London, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Tomb of Jesus Christ and the Lamentation Wall in Jerusalem, New York, the Berlin Wall, Brussels, Knokke-le-Zoute (Belgium), Rome, Pompeii, Pisa, the Suez Canal, Stonehenge, Athens, Cape Soúnion, the Nile, the Great Pyramids of Giza, Memphis, Kenya (Masai Mara), Cusco, Bangkok, Beijing, Tokyo,

negative aspect of our existence he reshapes it into a cry of joy, draws and emphasizes the optimistic aspect, defies pathos, and glorifies beauty. That his painting reflects those ideas and that his worldview speaks to the ode of existence is mostly substantiated by his only project Planetarium from 1996-1997, which starts with the idea of Urdin to create a unique painting that will tour almost the entire world in a period of one year. And, since he is by nature a megalomaniac, it is not a small canvas that we are talking about, but a huge 2 canvases that cover an area of 24 square meters each. And that’s not all! He does not venture alone in this adventure, but carries with him his own family (the wife and baby) and a whole team that is to document the “path of the creation of the

Aspen, oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm

release passion, to rejoice, to point out the profound essence and decisiveness of nature, of its order and the order which we, as the chief intruders, conquer unscrupulously, without regard to being rational, to enjoy what we have been given, and to leave it in a sound state for future generations. The painting “Planetarium” is an inaugural of the Planetarism, a movement whose origin is Urdin himself. It began its journey. The canvas was unwrapped and crucified, stretched and released, lying down or resting on, worn as a symbol of freedom, love, and universality, on the ground of spiritual magnificence, in places predestined for this ontology of the painting. Urdin, as a kind of clergyman who has been given the role of extractor of the life juices of different cultures

Kamakura, Mont Saint Michel, and Eindhoven. He passes through the crossroads of cultures, where God has bestowed all natural or intellectual beauty, but also where danger lurks; on the asphalt and in the metropolis, but also places untouched by human hand, in the wilds, in the havens, in the jungles, in the deserts, in the African primitive tribes; magical or chaotic places that have in some way influenced who we are today, what our planet Earth is like. Urdin enters this process wholeheartedly, not fearing any challenges or dangers along the way. He easily communicates with high intelligence, but also with the illiterate, with the powerful and with the beggars, with the developed and the underdeveloped, with humans and animals, trying and succeeding to find greatness in any consonant, to

Strange Country, 1996, oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm

in the studio, in hangars, mausoleums, enclosures, on the rocks beside the shore, on the asphalt, in the grass, in the desert. He paints, he draws, he communicates with the canvas, but he also destroys, covers up, paints over, as if he wants to capture the layeredness, the trace, the spirituality, the history, the archeology... The works contain expressive figuration, architecture, geometry, nature, symbolism, association, metaphor, infantilism, irrationality which then, at certain places, is covered with a new layer of monochromatic clear fields, dripping with droplets of color with dripping action, after which he emphasizes certain parts with bold black drawing and a line to give an overview of a given compositional whole, while the images also have natural atmospheric influences, the presence of water,

and natures, or the more essential role of an artistic emitter of subject energy accumulated by all these spiritual and mental conglomerates on a white canvas surface, begins his dialogue with the canvas. This passionate relationship is sometimes a gentle dance, making love and whispering, and sometimes a struggle and a conflict; at times it is pure metaphysics, and other times an expressive action; at times rational action, and more often the need to convey the impression and the deep feeling, cognition, emotion, gesture. The technical mode of painting is indeterminate. Urdin uses colors in large quantities, but also anything else that would seem to necessarily involve him in the painting process. He uses brushes, spatulas, hands, feet, cans of paint, pasted or thinned. He works outdoors, in the open air, but also

Dogona, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm

documented the path to the creation of the painting, following the script by Kiro Urdin, directed by Ivan Mitevski and produced by Macedonian Television. The film abounds in beautiful scenes that interweave the painting’s magical act and dialogue with the canvas with the natural/urban/cultural/civilization/ritual beauties, and symbolically begins with the baptism of his daughter Makedonka-Dona as one of the essential threads throughout this course, and that is the legacy, the generations and the salvation of planet Earth and all the splendor it has acquired over the centuries and that it carries as an invaluable treasure. These two elements were followed by the “Planetarium” ballet inspired by the film baring the same name, choreographed by the American Debbie Wilson, scenography by Kiro Urdin in collaboration

sand, sweat, fire, physical tremors, and shocks as traces of existence. The central and inescapable element of the painting is the planet, a circular shape that stands out in its final construction from everything surrounding it. With her calm and colorful surplus, informal texture and emphasized minuscule structure, it like she is trying to emanate the energy and expression of life occurring around us. That is Urdin’s Planetarium, a life transformed into a painting, and a painting that embodies life. Simple, yet complex; infantile, yet pretentious; small, yet large. The essence of Planetarism is the extension of the Planetarium in various disciplines and media, i.e. nothing ends with the painting. On the contrary, it all starts here. Parallel to the painting, an entire film was also shot, also titled the Planetarium, which

Metaphor, 1996, oil on canvas, 120 x 235 cm

with the OMO Dance Theater of Canada ballet dancers and MRTV dancers. Planet Earth was a central scenic décor, with the action taking place around it. The dancers presented life, with all its pros and cons, from love to hatred, from joy to pain. The emotion of the film and the story behind it, conveyed through the artistic eye of Urdin’s collaborator – Wilson, has given rise to yet another quality, innovative and aesthetically profound project as part of planetarism. Urdin’s first film “Pishta” dated 1974, and then “Dogona”, “Dogs and Trains”, “Water and Fire”, “Two Times”, “Life and Death”, and “Steps” – all fit in the direction of Planetarism. Why? Because they speak of basic human characteristics, of the homeless who choose to live their lives without resorting to rationing and turning their backs on the system and society,

devoted to the heart, to the street, to stray dogs and cheap wine; they speak of the rituals and beliefs of African tribes that glorify the gods of nature and believe in the energy of ancestors returned in the form of death; they talk about everyday change and transience, about time, about movement; the value system of animals and the established hierarchy of freedom; about the main predator on planet Earth – man and his unscrupulous destruction of nature; about life and death; about fate... Another discipline in which Urdin proves to be an excellent visualist and continues the discourse of Planetarism in every pore of his own creation is photography, a medium by which the artist’s watchful and observant sharp eye captures fascinating states, happenings, beauties, depths, destinies, souls, pores, landscapes, plays, details, in reporter’s fashion, but also

Love and Betrayal, 1997, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

through thoughtful compositions that by themselves, by all criteria, have the value of a sustained work of art. The restless spirit does not rest. Kiro Urdin, the Nomad1, cannot defuse the urge to construct, to create and fashion works, an act by which he experiences personal catharsis, but also by which he publicly rebels and contributes to awakening the awareness for salvation of the endangered planet Earth. He continues to live and create on different continents, himself

constantly tired of absorbing the juices of diversity that nature, civilizations, diverse cultures, but also the cosmos and the stars have to offer, often seeking answers to all questions right there in the Universe. Urdin’s latest art studies and realizations follow the path of planetarism. Two sets of pieces stand out, fresh out of Urdin’s studio where one can still smell the oil colors. Ones painted gradually, layered, with reflection and awareness, while the others painted in the spirit of gestural painting in one breath, in one move. The painted canvas is predominantly preoccupied with visualizing the universe, solar systems, meteors, celestial bodies, star explosions, looking at certain landmarks of the Earth seen from the cosmos and all the magic that is going on there, far above us. His

1 I use the term also in the literal sense, since Urdin lives in France, Belgium, America, Japan, China, the Netherlands, Macedonia... but also in a stylish sense, because he is very versatile in the modern and the postmodern, including him in the familiar and learned personal expressive nerve, as well as the heritage of the Macedonian climate.

Happiness, oil on canvas 80 x 120 cm

artistic approach has varied, from the more fanatical, to the action dripping, from new figuration to neoexpressionism, all intertwined with elements of informal, colored field and clausonism, as well as symbolism. The intense coloring plays the main role, with it he draws and paints, painting large surfaces, but also drawing minuscule geometric details or symbolic accents that as a pattern give texture to certain compositions. The second set of paintings, made in one move, are works done without involving ratio, predominated by the expression of the collected emotion and cognition. Some of them exude a certain calligraphic precision, in which concentration and meditation before the act of stroking the brush movement is an act of combat, skill,

determination. The color he usually uses to paint with is black or brown, and the background is the white, untouched surface of the canvas. The brush moves expressively across the surface, but it strikes, splashes, rebels. And this is just the beginning of another great story that is in sight, one that is ambitious and monumental, with a profound message, that is universal, cosmopolitan and planetary. Hoping that others will see the greatness of art, that they will experience the glory of life, glorifying nature and civilizations, but not excluding the story of planetarism, the cosmos, time, transience, changeability and care. Kiro Urdin offers such greatness, because great masters have great ideas.

War of the Spirits, oil on canvas, 170 x 280 cm

HUMANISING Man decided to humanise himself and from a man became a bird. The bird decided to humanise itself and from a bird became a plant. The plant decided to humanise itself and from a plant became a heart. The heart decided to humanise itself and from a heart became love.

Alliance, 2005, oil on canvas 170 x 230 cm

Essential Things, 2010, oil on canvas 130 x 160 cm

SAHARA In the Sahara the last bird was flying, the insects were already dead. In the Sahara the drought was growing like a blue, crystal net. The Sahara was dying in that final bird.

Before Futuristic City, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

DROPS “Tomorrow it will rain,” an anxious raindrop whispers to her sister. “Tomorrow we will leave forever, some new cloud awaits us.”

Futuristic City, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

IT HURTS O Lord, my soul burns and it hurts! Love is being born there where it hurts.

Steps of Time, oil on canvas, 200 x 400 cm

Exodus, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

KILIMANJARO Below the peak of Kilimanjaro bloomed the last rose, it message gleamed like a ray of light. Poets gathered from everywhere in honour of the life that had been born, and each poet sang a poem of eternal love for the rose that had bloomed.

Rhino, 2010, oil on canvas, 170x150 cm

100

POEMS Poet, do you know how to write poems? I don’t, but is there a poet who does? Poet, set out on the road to your soul, there lies the secret you seek.

Organic Feeling, 2008, oil on canvas, 140x160 cm

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A SECRET Be with me a little longer tomorrow I may not be here tomorrow the sky and the grass may not be here. Be with me a little longer tomorrow I may meet the secret I cannot meet today.

Third Dimension, 2008, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm

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STANDARD The man was standardly mad. When there were clouds in the standard The man was standardly mad. How many madmen in clouds there were! What the clouds wanted was standard rain, but the rain fell ever harder.

Pharaon Times, oil on canvas, 130 x 150 cm

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PAPER Don’t ask me to tell you my story, I don’t like to speak of myself. Dissolve into ink, become ink and a quill and start to write after me. I was born in a cottage of lake water, the larvae there breathed algae, the fishers were netted fish, the villagers wakened the dawn of day and each of them each day dreamed of his field. They were pure, liked rain and sun at the same time. In every shower their sun was born, and in the sunshine their rain. Don’t ask me to tell you my story. I am not that cottage any more, nor reed nor fish, nor lake water. I am not in rain any more, or sun, or morning, or dawn. I’m only a tired and crumpled piece of paper waiting to be discarded in the street.

Red Sea, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 330 cm

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BOUQUET Where is the spring’s bouquet? I want to be wed with it Where is love’s bouquet? I want to be wed with it. Where is the flower of love? I want to be wed with it.

Galician Red, 2001, oil on canvas, 120 x 160 cm

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Source of Life, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm 106

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Dogon Cosmogony, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm

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FRIEND A friend grieved for his friend, decided to grieve for him. The friend grieved for his friend, decided to die for him. The friend grieved for his friend, decided on resurrection for his sake.

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Europe, oil on canvas, 600 x 200 cm

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LENS What can I say to the lens! It looks at me and you. Isn’t it my eye, isn’t it your eye? What can I say to the lens? It looks at us, me and you. Which of us should be first to speak to it?

Oceanica, oil on canvas, 290 x 400 cm

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Planetarium Dance, 2010, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm 112

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CONCERT I will invite you to the concert of death. It will be free to all, everything will be free – sorrow, tears, oration. I will invite you freely to the concert of death. But is there anyone who knows how to hold his tongue for death is weary.

Experimental Music, 1996, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

Pompeii, 2005 oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm

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Galaxy Man, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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8th MARCH “Today is the Eighth of March,” was whispered among the flowers. “Today is the day of passion, a loving embrace awaits you.” Yellow Secret, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

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Fire of Love, 2008, oil on canvas, 135 x 90 cm

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CAPITAL LETTER Have you a comment on me? I swallow words and letters, commas and full-stops. But I am a capital letter and everything begins with me.

Amazon, 2010, oil on canvas, 176 x 128 cm

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Figaro, oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Circular World, 2018, oil on canvas, 120 x 160 cm

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Happy World, 2010, oil on canvas, 130 x 160 cm

Imaginary World, 2019, oil on canvas, 110 x 280 cm

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Gentle Feeling, 1998, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm 122

Colors of Love, 2018, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm 123

THE SAME In the bar the same faces, outside the same faces, at home the same face. When we were kids nothing was the same.

New Continent, oil on canvas, 146 x 196 cm

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Blue Waves, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

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A CHILD The child set out for the end of the world wanting to meet God. The child reached the heart of God, reached his mother’s tender breast.

Red Circles, oil & acryl on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Four Seasons, 1995, oil on canvas, 190 x 150 cm

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Blue Tendress, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Magic Garden, 2019, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm

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Cosmic Man, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm

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Pixologic Man, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Crystal Рain, 2018 oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

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The Valley of the Cubes, 2018, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm

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Old Egypt, 2018, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm

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The Birth of Phoenix, 2019, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 см 135

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Мicrosoft, 2019, oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm

Bahamas, 2018, oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm 137

Marvelous Marriage, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm

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Paris Night, 2019 oil on canvas, 202 x 155 см

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ANTELOPE How sere the grass. The antelope ran through the golden valley of life.

Matter Close Up, oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Big Bang Theory, 2018, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

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Prince, 2018, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm 142

Pantera, 2018, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm 143

Blue Synthesis, 2018, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm 144

Dilemma, 2018, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

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Two Events, 2019, oil on canvas , 160 x 120 см

Google, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Happy Family, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

Secrets, 2018, oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm

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MXD Galaxy, 2019, oil on canvas. 160 x 120 cm

First Life, 2019, oil on canvas 200 x 120 cm

150

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Аsterisk Road, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Red Planet, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Far in the Sky, 2019, oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm 154

The Birth of the Meteors, 2019 oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm 155

Maui, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 140 cm

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Red Moon, 2019, oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm

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Ethiopia, 2019 oil on canvas, 202 x 155 см

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Structure XY, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Coral Island, 2019, oil on canvas, 120 x 160 cm

Тhe Chemistry of Love, 2019, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm

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Structure XM, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Blue Harmony, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Undiscovered World, 2019, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

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Cosmic Particles, 2019, oil on canvas, 185 x 335 cm

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Beautiful Colors, 2019, oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm

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Invisible World, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Night Dream, 2019, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

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Five people, five continents, one person a universe.

Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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I could never resolve this dilemma: do we live in an abnormal or an amoral epoch?

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I smile optimistically towards the four sides of the world.

Isotopes disintegrate slowly, and characters quickly.

The weather is fickle today, and people will be fickle tomorrow, too.

One drunk in a barrel of alcohol ñ Diogenes, several drunks in a barrel of alcohol ñ philosophers.

If the casino is your only chance, play another card.

We are both losers if only one of us always wins.

A simple rule, a difficult way to get to it.

All women are whores, and all men who visit them are virgins.

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Man: NO, NO. ñ Woman: NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO. ñ The sum of the words explains everything.

The end of the world is nigh, all countries have joined in to build that fatal weapon.

Most widespread animal on Earth is cancer.

Iíve invented a new kind of jogging, Iím running after her.

It is hard to start from zero, even harder to get there.

Thereís a philosopher with universal wisdom ñ heís called Old Age.

He developed into an accomplished personality; a speaker outside and a listener at home.

What steel hammer shall I use to nail a wooden nail?

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Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

What do cows think of silicone breasts?

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Donít stand close to a cow or youíll be milked too. 175

Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier 176

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A painterís life is a constant poker game, it all depends on the combination of colors.

I will go away on a holiday in an exotic country, I want to be bored imaginatively.

The language of stupidity is universal, it needs no translation.

Run faster, the time is flying by.

I will be resurrected, but Iím waiting for the rain to stop.

Every mountain has a peak and every peak has its highest point.

Between the smile and laughter lies the nuance of the spirit.

A general cosmic rule; the stars are spots.

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Move the rock you stand on if there is a spring underneath.

Let us build farms for wild animals; we will have more to shoot on safari.

Write the novel of life in four seasons.

Cin cin ñ fuck-fuck.

I apologize for my future mistakes.

Some cry for love, others whine about it.

Each rules their own territory, God rules the heavens and money rules the world.

The artist doesnít know where to start, but that is his sweetest dilemma.

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The middle class is not average. Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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Love perfection, itís the best menu.

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Donít cut off the shadow, it is the branch I sit on.

Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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Man was primitive in prehistory and brutal in history.

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If you have nothing to boast about, donít boast about yourself.

The sexual revolution has been plasticized.

I eat phosphorus by day, and I glow by night.

Fake love is like a pesticide, it grows faster, but itís poisonous.

To be easier to tolerate your life companion, s/he must be absent occasionally.

The form you need to take is human, and the figure is a pawn.

One can never learn as much as when having a wiser lifelong enemy.

You know more, and I tolerate that.

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I lost my mind to a beautiful woman; Iíll find it when I start paying for her.

It is better to win over oneself than to be defeated by others.

Confident inside, sovereign ñ outside.

The vital advantage of being a poltroon is that one can live under every skin.

I exchange riches for youth, I sell youth for money.

A stranger at home, a stranger abroad, a citizen of the world.

Those who conquer the world with a scourge will be cut by a sword.

The average rules the world and that is why the middle is subjugated.

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Art is not fashion, it neither comes nor goes, it stays. Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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Mr. President, may I speak louder with you?

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Well said, badly understood. Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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A man and a woman are victims: man the wifeís and woman the husbandís.

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A frog croaks louder when it falls into a pond of money.

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Iíll bare my teeth, but if youíre a dentist, Iíll change my mind.

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The universe is not endless, itís beginning-less. Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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Make the space around you visible with the lightness of your spirit.

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Most widespread animal on Earth is cancer. Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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The stone with which you want to hit the target is a meteorite.

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A biologist was hunting butterflies, and a hunter was shooting at them.

Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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You know more than me, and I stand that.

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Kiro Urdin’s Аtelier

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Collaboration Kiro Urdin and Sylvia Jones

Jones photo studio

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Ohrid, Planetarium

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THE SPIRIT OF MAN IS A BIRD Searching for the platform for saving Planet Earth, Kiro Urdin deeply uncovers the essence of human soul.

What was crucial to receive the film award

You often quote Michelangelo who said that

at the festival in China?

“Big things are in the details and the details are not

Fundamental in the whole thing, which I think was

a small thing.” What do you mean by detail?

crucial for the film to win the prize, is the distorted

In order to recognize great work, sometimes you do not

way of looking at things. But for me it is the right way,

need great knowledge. It is in a close-up and it is always

because people in the world show racism towards other

visible. However, to recognize a detail it takes great

people, but also towards animals. They divide animals into good and bad, into eligible and non-eligible, into docile animals that are colonized at farms and wild animals which have a strong character. They can’t colonize wild animals because they cannot rein in their spirit and

knowledge. Details are always revealed through a deep analysis, which requires great knowledge. I also have an aphorism on the subject that reads: “Read the word several times and you’ll see that it has nuances.” So, for me, details have monumental importance. Sometimes

therefore they remain authentic, resist and live as they

love begins with a glance or a small flower, and then it

please. Therefore, I prefer wild animals. The main role

association of the action is “roads” – the roads of life,

develops into a family, or into a storm, a drama, sometimes it becomes a novel, and other times a film. Sometimes the boundary between the micro and the macro world is not defined and it can be perceived only through the flutter of the soul. And the only thing that cannot be measured is human soul.

of love, of disappointment, of recognizing the truth, of

Where you most often live in recent years?

abandoning friendships, of success and especially of

The spirit of man is a bird. It flies everywhere, but still

failure. The entire dramatic structure of the film is built

returns to its nest. Whether I am here or abroad, I always

on a road that makes a cosmic connection between the

live in Macedonia. My dream, my soul is Macedonia.

destinies of people, wildlife and trees. Hence appears the

It’s something that does not depend on me, but it is

symbolism of the roads of destruction along which planet Earth moves. Nature is already rebelling against man.

incorporated in my soul. Although, according to the way

The universe created man, and he in turn, destroying

source of the soul and man always returns to the source, because there the water is cleaner and there things are

in my film is a hyena that people consider bad, and I consider it a useful animal. First of all, because it is the architect of hygiene in the savannah. Although the film is titled “Two Times” another name that emerged as an

of life, I am cosmopolitan. However, there is always a

nature, destroys the universe.

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Taken from book “Words Leave Traces” by Toni Dimkov, Magor, Skopje, 2016 Originally published in Gragjanski/Artery/Interview

better seen. One person asked what nostalgia is. It is

man thinks he is a man, and, in fact, he is the fiercest

the water that you drank through the mother’s milk.

enemy of nature. The greed of the modern man is

This water is built into your genes and when you are

unstoppable. Man has no “brakes” in his desires; there is

away, it restores the need to go back to where you were

no limit to his own ego. The universe gave him reason,

born. So sometimes when I come back, I feel the chills.

but instead of humanizing, human reason militarized

I believe that one day there will be no states or borders,

itself. If using a time-travel machine, at least for a

and people will only be divided into good and bad. In

moment, we transfer ourselves in prehistoric time and

this connection, perhaps, a higher consciousness will

come back again, the first thing we will notice is that

be born that will definitely find a platform for saving

man has become a death machine. In prehistoric times

planet Earth.

people were struggling to feed themselves and survive.

In which direction does the world we live in move?

Nowadays we often say that bad people succeed most

It is obvious that it moves toward self-destruction.

in life, while the good ones and the intellectuals are

Ever since I was small, I listened to my mother saying,

outsiders, hidden in a corner out of fear not to be

“One day the world will end.” I’m sure she didn’t mean

seen by the eye of the greedy and the aggressive. We

the prophecy of the Maya nor do I believe in it, but

seem to have lost the definition of being human. The

the world will end, as my mother added – from the

solution lies in human communication man to man,

hands of the learned ones. This means that humanity

soul to soul. Until a fair distribution of wealth happens,

creates perfect technologies that will bring it closer

humanity will move backwards. A ray of hope is given

to its self-destruction. Even today it happens that we

by the tendency of the richest men in the world, such

are overwhelmed by toxic waste for which we cannot

as Gates, Slim, Buffett, who began distributing part of

provide a large enough storage space. And what my

their wealth to the poorest inhabitants of the planet. It

mother foretold happened in just a single human life.

means that man should humanize. He should return

What will then happen to Earth, for example, in 200 thousand years!?

to the roots of his own soul. Therefore I made the film

What could the solution be to such a situation?

“Two Times” as a prism through which one can see the

The solution is for man to become a man. Formally,

roads of human misfortune.

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PLANETARIUM (1996/97) The painting “Planetarium” consists of two panels, each covering 24 square metres. It presents itself as a multimedia project, as an integration and synthesis of several arts such as paintings, film, video, photography, music, literature, philosophy, ballet, design... The artist KIRO URDIN has dedicated twenty months to the execution of this work in different places on our planet:

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the Berlin Wall, Nerezi, Ohrid, Brussels, Knokke-le-Zoute, Bruges, Paris, Rome, Pompei, Pisa, the Suez Canal, London, Stonehenge, Athens, Cape Soúnion, the Tomb of Jesus Christ and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the Nile, the Great Pyramid in Giza, Memphis, Kenya (Masai Mara), New York, Machu Picchu, Cuzco, Bangkok, Beijing (the Forbidden City) and the Great Wall of China, Tokyo, Kamakura, Nuenen and Eindhoven.

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THE PLANETARISM MOVEMENT One point everywhere, all points in one. One art in all arts, all the arts in one.

lthough space and time are without a beginning and without an end, man is trying to define them, to limit them. He does the same to art. He divides it into painting, music, literature, film, video, ballet, theatre, design... as if they are hermetically closed inside themselves. Maybe that’s not it, or maybe it’s everything that there is. But, let us return to art as a cosmic figure of the beautiful and the sublime, or let us imagine it as multiple golden threads intertwined into a snakes nest. What is now the main appearing form and content? Is it possibly that common code into which one part is dependent on another to be imagined as a result of the universal creative ether into which the single and the general are in a permanent relation? For example, the form of the dancer is the volume for the sculptor, a sculpture can be part of the decor of a theatre performance, the written word can be future film script, the excitement of the trance of the musical rhythm, the dramaturgical gesture of the color from a painters pallet... Does not all this hide the magician called art, or is it religion, and the artist is a herald sent by God to bring into his hand the icon lamp that will burn with beauty, harmony and love, ennobling everything around it with its light. Kiro Urdin Paris, 1998

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KIRO URDIN’S PLANETARIUM

ecently, the movie “Planetarium” by Kiro Urdin and Ivan Mitevski was awarded first place for the best documentary film at the prominent NY International Independent Film and Video Festival in the United States. Planetarium is a multimedia project that incorporates several artistic media – painting, photography, film, dance and music. At the center of this project is a painting by the most internationally established Macedonian artist – Kiro Urdin. The painting is 48 square meters; more precisely it is two paintings – one of which the artist burned in Jerusalem – that have been painted in different locations during a great journey throughout the world, a journey covering Ohrid, Skopje, Brussels, Paris, Rome, Pompei, Pisa, London, Stonehenge, Athens, Jerusalem, the Egyptian pyramids, Kenya’s Masai Mara, New York, Cuzco, Bangkok, the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Great Chinese Wall, Tokyo, Kamakura – an endless movement through space and time. This project, painted in faraway places, symbolically brings together the world in one undivided unity. “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space” writes Shakespeare in Hamlet. One powerful artist’s imagination can put the dimensions of our planet in a little nutshell or a DVD; if you open it, bold light emerges, the colors of a rainbow are interchanging and you can hear wonderful music. Faraway places, surreal fields, unusual buildings, questioning faces are in front of us like a dream. Time and space are condensed and unified. Everything starts and ends with Kiro Urdin’s attempt to integrate the world into one painting. Marcus Aurelius says that whatever period in history – century, year, a single night, may not be understandable reality or this unrepeatable moment contains all of history. The belief in such a history made Schopenhauer compare history with a kaleidoscope, in which the images are changing but not the pieces of colored glass. He believes that history is an endless dream of mankind. A dream that all of us dream. Or maybe there has always been one man from the beginning of the world until now, who dreams all of us. If the world is someone’s dream, if there is somebody who is dreaming of us and is dreaming the history of the universe, the destruction of religions and arts, and burning all the libraries and buildings of the past, in somebody’s dream, it is not more important than the destruction of furniture. The ghost that dreamt them, will dream them again, and while the ghost keeps on dreaming, nothing will be lost, says Borges. Watching Kiro Urdin’s documentary movie, which shows the process of making the painting Planetarium, had an impression that I was dreaming Kiro Urdin’s dream, who dreams the dream of mankind: all pain and sadness, all happiness and delightfulness, all turmoil and longing, all suffering and love, all lost moments that are beyond retrieval disappeared and now are glittering like grains of sand in the desert of our lives, all the drama of our uncertain existence, all our roaming on the road, a long road on which we walk together – all in one singular painting. Emil Aleksiev

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Jerusalem, 1997

Knokke-le-Zoute, 1996

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London, 1997

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Bruges, 1996

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Macedonia, 1996

Mont Saint-Michel, 1997

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Mont Saint-Michel, 1997

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Stonehenge, 1997

London, 1997

Stonehenge, 1997

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Kenya (Masai Mara), 1996

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Kenya (Masai Mara), 1996

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Jerusalem, 1997

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Jerusalem, 1997 Jerusalem, 1997

Jerusalem, 1997

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New York, 1997

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New York, 1997

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The Great Wall of China, 1997 234

Beijing (the Forbidden City), 1997

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Tokyo, Kamakura, 1997

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Bangkok, 1997

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Machu Picchu, 1997

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Machu Picchu, 1997

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Memphis, 1996

The Great Pyramid in Giza, 1996

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The Great Pyramid in Giza, 1996

The Suez Canal, 1996

Memphis, 1996

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Mont Saint-Michel, 1997

Paris, 1996

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Brussels, 1996

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Pisa, 1997

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Pompei, 1997

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Soúnion, 1996

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The Berlin Wall, 1996

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Macedonia, Nerezi, 1996

Macedonia, 1996

Skopje, 1997

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Malaysia, 1997

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Eindhoven, Netherlands, 1997

Nuenen, Netherlands, 1997

Eindhoven, Netherlands, 1997

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Eindhoven, Netherlands, 1997

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Planetarium Painting, 1997

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DEBBIE WILSON Choreographer Debbie Wilson is the Artistic Director and Founder of the OMO Dance Company for which she has created a repertoire of critically acclaimed works, including Homo Office Sapiensis, which received a 2002 Dora Mavor Moore nomination for “Outstanding New Choreography“, Aphrodite Unveiled and Raphael is Whispering. Through her international collaborative works like Planetarium (with Macedonia) and Diary of an Exile (with Trinidad and Tobago) she has introduced outstanding foreign artists in dance, music and art to Toronto while representing Toronto and Canada on the world stage.

DEBBIE WILSON AND PLANETARIUM

Wilson is a dance and social activist who believes in using her art to forge ties among peoples and create catalysts that stimulate constructive dialogue about the betterment of our community.

ometimes unpredictable things happen in life. Such an unpredictable thing is my collaboration with the great choreographer Debbie Wilson who lives and works in Toronto. By coincidence Debbie saw my film “Planetarium” and proposed to me to do a ballet performance based on the film script. Thus, our cooperation was born.

Her choreographic themes reflect our current social environment and provide insights to the beauty and truth of the human condition that audiences have found moving, relevant, accessible and most of all, powerful.

The work was first performed in Toronto by the dancers from OMO Dance Theatre and MNT (Macedonian National Theatre). The artists from Canada were from various nationalities, precisely in the spirit of Planetarism. This was followed by performances in Skopje, Ohrid, Heraclea, Chicago, Ankara, as well as the performance in Geneva to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. In her interview Debbie very explicitly spoke of the eternal dilemmas and material uncertainty when it comes to living off the arts, referring to the moments of the joint project.

Her work forge ties between peoples of all ages and cultures through projects that are created to give a better understanding of the world we live in today. Wilson has also established links and continues to work with an expanding list of local and international community social groups that provide aid in the health and social sectors. She is currently a Board Member of the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation, serving on the fundraising, communications, strategic planning and Bike Rally committees. Wilson began her professional career with the Cincinnati Ballet Company at the age of 12 where she was promoted to soloist and rehearsal assistant. She has worked as dancer/rehearsal mistress for The American Dance Machine, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, Howard Richard & Dancers and Ballet Jorgen. She has also worked for the Judith Marcuse Repertory Dance Company, the Randy Glynn Dance Project and many independent choreographers across Canada and the US. Ms. Wilson’s rich background as dancer, teacher and rehearsal director reflects a lifetime of work with some to the greatest artists of our time, a lifetime reflected in her resonant choreographic voice.

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Geneva, United Nations, Congress Hall, 2005

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Skopje, Macedonian Opera and Ballet, 2004 Planetarium Dance

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Paris, 1975

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Cure your heart with more love.

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Anonymity is less bearable than loneliness.

Paris, 1975

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“Pishta” is my first film shot in 1974 on Place du Tertre in Paris.

the seed of life. Yet at one moment he did think to himself: Have I gone mad? Nothing is clear to me any more, and it never will be. His memories were like a broken reel of film with strange, faint images. Some of the pictures were scribbled over with irregular lines, others damaged by the fangs of time. How swiftly his youth and his whole life had passed. The cavaliers of the nocturnal life had long since gone for ever. But his decision had already been made. The flight of three steps, the paving-stones, the wall. Here he found new friends once more. Fate had drawn them to one place. Birds. Dogs. Those bohemians of hunger and alcohol. On the streets there was no water anywhere, not a drop. And they were parched with thirst, drunk with thirst. Each one of them was alone. Each of them lived for the others. In his soul now lived all souls. The clouds, the rain and the steps. The steps he continued to take, ascending and descending in life. So was he not a constant traveller, fated to bear the hump of loneliness? Why did he drink? Why did he sleep under the stars, winter and summer, in the cold and in the fog? More and more steps. Towns and cities. Endless paths and roads. The corridors of solitude... Yet so it continued until he came across the three steps. He fell in love with them immediately. Forever. Passionately. His soul began to ascend and descend them. He quivered day and night. Breathless, timeless. So began their romance... And so he began to speak. He talked and talked. About himself. To himself. He wanted to announce something to the stars, to the steps, to the walls, to the flagstones, to the birds. To be close to them. He resolved not to go anywhere any more. To stay here. Just here. Now the three steps were the temple of the holy words to which he would go. Where he would tread. He had not come here to leave again just like that. He had come to stay. He had fallen in love for the first time. At last the play of his life had halted to listen to the speech of the traveller who had said nothing. He talked and talked. He was convinced that the time that had flown past was a train seized-up on a rusty track. This was the point he had been searching for. Life. The thirst for life. They were all thirsty, and not a drop of water in the streets. And so they were drunk with thirst. Why did the birds visit him so often?! Why did the dogs bark here?! Everything had its own significance. That is why he was forever thirsty. That is why he never stopped speaking.

he protagonist is Hungarian legionnaire who fought in the wars in Chad, Algeria and Indochina. He was the best known vagabond at the famous Montmartre, a friend and favourite character of artists. Pishta was regarded as a classic representative of the bohemian Montmartre free spirit. His warm soul was home for abandoned dogs and hungry birds, and he often shared his poor meal with them. In the end, he left this world as a cosmic energy. One August afternoon he set himself on fire and burned down before the eyes of artists and tourists. It seems that the energy of his soul left patina on the stone tiles of Place du Tertre. Nobody knows how the story of his life began. He had made up his mind to be a friend to everyone. To everything. Even if they proclaimed him an outsider. As an emigrant of the soul. He travelled on and on. Travelled to where he would never reach. Through the walls of his solitude. If only he could turn the waters of the rivers into alcohol! Into steam! How much less painfully would his soul sail in that case! He understood it was his fate to travel in freedom, in time, without wife, without children, without a home. Had he really once been born? Did he have a mother, a father... a birthplace, a sky of his own? It seemed to him that his whole life had taken place in only one day. He didn’t even want to know about it. And did the stars know this? How many nights he had spent under them! If only he could have come closer to them! But the streets stretched out in his soul like an endless road. Towns came to resemble each other. The highways too. Streets – paved, muddy, twisted, colourful, broad, narrow. Streets with no horizon. Yet his steps had their own purpose. They stepped out of their own accord. They were the steps of his life which was passing. Streets without houses, without trees. Only walls and more walls. Paving-stones drawn from the womb of the underworld. His music was the wind which journeys everywhere – and why not think of the wind as flights of music. The trees of a dessicated life... But wasn’t all this a delusion? He thought of himself as a shadow moving along roads, through towns that no longer existed. In his soul there lived rivers, fish, clouds, birds, the winds and the steps. The steps, flights he ascended and descended. Now downwards towards life, now up into the clouds. He wanted to touch them, to be a bird, flying free in the wind. To become a cloud, his soul falling in the rain, bearing

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DOGONA

he film was shot in Bandiagara, an area in Mali. It is about a mystical tribe called Dogon.

Before them the Tellem lived in their territory, a red-skinned people. The Dogon believe they were bird-people who occasionally come back transformed into sand storms and disappear again. The Dogon believe that the universe is the work of their god Amma, who is also the creator of death. Actually, he killed the first man and thus death was born. The incident happened near the Juba mountain massif. Before this event, there was no death. To mark the event, a ritual called Sigui is held once every 60 years throughout the whole Bandiagara country. On that day, a model of death with a large carved mask containing the spirit of Amma’s first son, Nommo, embodied as a serpent, dances together with the other members of the tribe, that way paying tribute to their god.

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Where were they to go. By water and by land. There was sunshine everywhere. Every day. And stars too. Sometimes mothers collected the stars in wooden vessels and gave them to their children. To the north was the River Niger, and it seemed to the oldest Dogon that at the time of his brother’s funeral Nomo was whispering to him and making it known to him: There, in the north, lies Bandiagara. On the river bank the crocodiles are waiting to carry you across to the other side. To the chaos on the steep, stony bank. There are the rocks of the Tellem, the bird people, the great wizards of the realm of spells. Indeed, they appear from time to time as a sandstorm with a herd of wild animals or with the white fox. That’s how the Dogons got to Bandiagara. Here in the massif of the Yugo the first Siqui began, in honour of the first one to die. The masked dancers dance every sixty years recalling the moment when death was first born. Olobolu, the dancer with the big snake mask, leapt about with a marvellous lightness while his soul was full of Ama, Nomo and the eight ancestors. It seemed as if the prayer of the oldest Dogon was issuing from the great mask as he lifted up his arms towards Nomo and the other ancestors. He prayed that rain would fall, that the fields sown with onions, rice and corn would be watered. That the pregnant women would have easy births. They believed in the power of the Almighty, who had succeeded in uniting space and time. He knew from what his grandfather had told him that only the body can die, not the spirit, it was a part of Ama. Neither could it die, nor be born. He gazed at the sacred paths. The spirits are here, around us. They see us, they love us, but they also punish our sins. That’s why you must always take care.

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Everything has a soul. Even death. Life and death live side by side, like the earth and the sky. He went barefoot all his life. He felt neither stones, nor sand, nor thorns. His skin was as hard as the drought. The eight totems protected him from everything. Even from thirst. Less and less rain fell. Sometimes, in Bandiagara, during the days of the Tellems, the great wizards, there were herds of antelopes, lions and leopards. But they’d all vanished because of the drought. The plants, insects and birds too. The sand had become their graveyard. Everyone was praying for rain. Even the dead. From time to time the Tellems appeared as a sandstorm, accompanied by their vanished herds, or in company with the white fox. But the Dogons remained here, their spirit survived. The rice continued to grow and ripen to harvest. The onions too. The skilled hands of the Dogons went on fashioning figurines and masks. The mornings, when the darkness still clung to the landscape, the infants, grown one with their mothers’ backs, mutely watched the first blows of the mattocks. The fields had to be sown. The first rains had only just fallen. And their older brothers and sisters were still sleeping without a care in the world under the mantle of the stars. Then his grandfather went on with his tale: Before the time of Doyogu-Seru, the first man to die, death had not existed. That was why the Dogons made the great snake mask, in honour of the birth of death. When you were born – continued his grandfather – the rains dried up for three years. The sun grew bigger each day. By night new stars emerged.

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It began to seem to the Dogons as if they slept on stars, there were so many of them. The women stopped wailing over death and instead of weeping over it they wept over thirst. But the dancers were here, the masks, the figurines with their arms raised to Ama, to Nomo, the dead ancestors whose spirits, living here beside them, the eight living totems which protected them – the living power of Nyama. Thirst gave way in face of that protecting power. So the plants did not dry up, the infants grew, only the birds didn’t fly, the air was too hot. Soon heavy rains fell. The livestock were watered after such a long time when not a drop of rain had fallen. Dolo remembered when his grandfather had died. It was May. The masked dancers wove in a spiral around their house. The dead body of his ancestor was placed in a freshly hollowed-out tree trunk on the verandah, and in a trance the oldest Dogon explained, by means of mime, the symbols and the genesis of the cosmos. Night had long since fallen and it was as if the almighty Ama was riding on its shoulders. At one moment it seemed to him that the eight totems were sitting on his grandfather’s body, exchanging greetings with the spirit that had not yet left his body. Dolo was captivated by the dancers, the masks, the figurines, by the mannikin of death, and the sacrifice was brought out, that meant that Nomo was here too, Ama was there. And all the ancestors. Space had merged into a single point. The stars, wind, fire, water and time too. From the other side the sound of tools could be heard. One of the neighbours was completing the sculpture which was to be sacrificed. On the other side of the fence the children were drawing something incomprehensible.

That morning they had hoped that the white fox would pass across the picture so that the holy ones could figure out the augury. And the children drew and played innocently and purely as their childlike hearts bade them. Dolo recalled the words of his grandfather. Death has a soul, he said, everyone has a body and several souls, and a living power, and is born and lives in water. It is everything. When a baby is born, it drinks water through the milk. Before death the old people ask for water. Everything is born in it: light, wind, earth, even fire. Plants, insects, birds. The soul. Even the deserts are created by water. At night, when everyone is asleep, water is transformed into a bird with enormous wings that flies over Bandiagara. In the morning it vanishes with the sun. And when Ama decides the sand can be transformed into rain, the desert into a sea. Life flows for a time, joy returns, men love only water more than their women. But when it vanishes, fear puts in an appearance, pain, hunger, thirst... Dolo felt happy at all this. His soul laughed. Death seemed to him to be the shadow of Sirius, lying upon the body of his grandfather. He rejoiced in the dancers’ airy leaping. And the spirits of all the other dead were there somewhere in the offing. At dusk they would have to set off for the marvellous land of the ancestors, to the realm of the holy spirits. Everything was everlasting that night, the spirits could neither be born nor die. The universe of immortality was gathered into the eye of Ama.

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Bandiagara, Mali

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Dolo

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Bandiagara, Mali

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Win with kindness, it lasts longer.

Bandiagara, Mali

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I soon started studying painting, and later, film directing. I earned my living doing all kinds of manual labour. As time went by I made a living doing portraits or silhouettes. Then I lost my work permit. This way of doing business was forbidden. It was then that I finally decided to devote myself to painting only. I witnessed and participated in a life full of cigarettes, alcohol, sleepless nights and frequent brawls in bohemian Montmartre. But I also saw the great friendship between us, the painters, and the people who lived in the neighbourhood. In those days glorious Montmartre was the soul of Paris. We painted by day and lived out our youth by night. The thirst for friendship hovered above us. Three wonderful tramps and a white dog named Pony lived with us. Montmartre will remember them all as the four princes of the free spirit of the small square. Soon death began to separate them. The first tramp, who went by the name of Napoleon, died of thrombosis on a staircase. Pishta, a former Hungarian legionnaire, set himself on fire in broad daylight and burned before our very eyes. Andre died of pneumonia and Pony joined them a short while later. One morning this unique stray dog was run down by a car. It seemed as if the death of the four veterans marked the end of the warm soul of the old square. The painters were becoming middle-aged. The morning greetings were no longer what they used to be. The walls of distance were rising like skyscrapers. Although separated by only a yard, we would not exchange a single word, for weeks. And whether it was because of jadedness or fatigue, there was ever less friendship among us. And the years went by. The Place du Tertre was advancing towards its deep autumn. My agent Michael and I arrived in New York toward the end of 1988. We were in good spirits. Before our departure we had received a postcard from Alberta inviting us to visit her.

Michael had told me many times in Paris about their love affair. She lived in a luxurious apartment near Central Park. After a short buzz, the door opened and an endless dialogue ensued between Michael and Alberta. It seemed to me that certain coldness was creeping in. We were tired and hungry, but more than that, we felt helpless and miserable. It seemed as if we had come from some underworld without the right to see the light. I had a feeling that I was becoming alienated from myself. It looked as if we were both entering the hallway of some polar chamber. This strange woman was depriving me in a very painful way of my vision of New York and America. And I thought: Am I indeed becoming alienated from myself? Passing through many American cities, Michael and I arrived in New Orleans. I was running out of money. We were planning to spend the night in a deserted boat. However, a friend of ours introduced us to a lady who agreed to give us a room for three dollars. Madame Olson had been a Hollywood starlet in the 1930s. The walls of her apartment were plastered with photographs from her young days. The glory of her bygone beauty loomed over all those photographs. The apartment had three rooms. In each room there was a TV set and many lightbulbs. She immediately warned us that in her home they had to be turned on at all times. The windows in all the rooms were walled up. The sight excited hopelessness. It seemed as if Madame Olson had painted a fresco of her loneliness in this sealed space. Were the lightbulbs and the TV sets which were always turned on the windows of her soul? And yet, during that night, as we were trying to get some sleep, it seemed that the old age of this lonely woman bounced off the walls of her strange home. The next morning, Madame Olson prepared a breakfast which consisted of an omelette made with one egg and some onion, and a slice of bread. She shared her meal with us. Later, I was long haunted by the great soul of this lonely old woman. I can feel her presence close to me, like the gentle mother of all mothers.

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Paris. A late November night, and it had not stopped raining for three days. Through my studio window I watched the dark silhouette of an exhausted dog. Its slow stride revealed its old age. To the left stood a container full of garbage. I could catch a glimpse of my latest painting in the depths of my studio. I watched it silently. It was worn out and without soul. It looked like a squeezed mass hurled into space. I was helpless and lonely in my despair. I wanted to destroy it, to burn it up, but I did not have the strength to walk the distance from the window to the painting. Paris. Several years had gone by... One night I was wandering from bar to bar. It was August. The streets were deserted and nothing was happening. When I returned to my studio I had no wish to do anything. There was not enough breathing space. It was filled with things. I began to look for some space to begin painting, but I could not see it. I became depressed. I was distraught and I hated myself from the depths of my soul. I started breaking and burning everything that was within my reach. I threw the radio, the table and the mattress through the window. For the next three years I slept on boards. The empty room began to resemble an erased space. Paints and canvases were littered all over the place. I tried to understand time, I tried to caress it. I imagined it as a prince who was now on a ship, now in a desert, now on a cloud... Then I watched how it ran on for years on and across different crossroads. Through the archives of my memory I wanted to reach the freedom of its omnipotence. And I still keep travelling and trying to reach the universe of its freedom. But time begins once again to drift away...

My dear child Today is November 6, 1996. This morning I touched for the very first time the tomb of Jesus Christ and wept for the soul of my mother, of my father and for all poor souls. The Son of God, crucified and eternal, was above me on the cross. It seemed that the pain of Golgotha hovered above the candle smoke. Then I passed by the Wailing Wall, and the scent of eternity was in the Jerusalem air. That night I had a premonition. I realized that I must burn my Planetarium in eternal Jerusalem in order to resurrect the spirit of a new offspring, Planetarium.

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Photo History of the Planetarium Paintigs, 1996-1997

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Feel good in your own skin; years decide under it.

phorisms, aphorisms, a compressed language form which is too stingy to say more, but it is the richest when saying the least.

Therefore, aphorisms imposed themselves as a replacement for a classical scenario. As a result of that, the materials recorded in Japan, China, Bolivia, Belgium, France and Germany got a freer form. Trains run constantly, we do not know if dogs perform a human role or people perform a canine role. Because of this we do not know who should be whose best friend. In train carriages there are the closed eyes of dream or the agony of daily fatigue. Time eats space, and man is a part of both. Planet Earth is a black hole that swallows itself and trains continue to move with or without people.

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Knokke, Belgium

Cannes, France

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Cannes, France

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Eindhoven, Netherlands

Cannes, France

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Cannes, France

Bangkok, Thailand 303

Bolivia

Knokke, Belgium

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Bolivia

Knokke, Belgium

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Carnivores are bad because they eat meat; herbivores are good because they eat flowers.

WATER AND FIRE

he world has turned into water and fire. Or into flood and wildfire. In this dramatic moment of human history, when the ice surface of

Antarctica turns into land, when in the streets of cities rivers begin to flow, or water collects in ponds, when temperatures ominously remind us that planet Earth will soon be turned into planet Fire, it is obvious that everything has gone awry. A man plays the main role of a predator, like a ruthless screenwriter and director who knows no boundaries. During this incomprehensible spree driven by megalomaniac greed for money, the levels of toxins grow, the air is polluted, and the same goes for water. All this has a direct effect on fish that live in those waters and swallow all that plastic, the animals which are left without the ground beneath their legs, and the birds which lose the clean air beneath their wings. Everywhere seas and oceans rise of concrete jungles, buildings, undergrounds, roads, highways, warehouses for chemicals and weapons, abandoned vehicles gravesites… Everything is in a tight space, because everything rises. The bullet of human greed brutally kills everything in its path, suppressing the planetary cry to rescue the beautiful planet Earth.

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Kenya

My parrot asked me what animal from the human species I am.

Tanzania

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Kenya

Macedonia, Dragan Spasov-Dac

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Kenya

Tanzania

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Kenya

Tanzania

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TWO TIMES “Two Times” is the second film from my trilogy dedicated to the African savannah. The main line in the script moves between the sun and the rain or rather between life and death. Life is born with the sun and rain, and dies without them. Therefore, man in the final moments of his life looks at the sky, because it is there that the sun and rain are born, but that same sky can be their grave as well. I must mention that each year two to three million gnus cross the river Mara between Kenya and Tanzania. For thousands of years the most fascinating spectacle in nature happens in this place. It all looks like a unique theatre spectacle in which predators stalk their prey, but thanks to new pastures and hope many animal herds widen their own horizons. Here, everything is united, it is the end or the continuation, or it is randomness which determines the fortune or misfortune.

aybe the tree branches hold the history of the heaven and earth, or the secrets of the ancient man who lived there. And how strange are their trunks. One minute wriggled, the other twisted or broken in two by thunder and lightning. Trees that grow, wither, fall under ground without having the history of their life cut. And here time runs so quick as if it was smaller than a drop. Are there grasses made of elephant and gnu herds, mountains made of underground rivers, and sky made of earth? There are no rules here. Everything is all, and all is in everything. The soul of the savannah travels day and night as an unknown traveller full of secrets. And while it moves, it lives like an amoeba, it self-fertilizes together with its marvellous world. As if God borrowed His body to her so that everyone is inside. Soon strong rain might pour, or a sand dust might rise behind some unwanted vehicle, as a foreboding of something about to happen. But in a short while everything will quiet down. It will quiet down in its calmness. And the nights can stop, they can grow dark. And all that was in that darkness, seems that it is no more in the morning. The image of the yesterday is pale and life enters the game once again. In that continent of life two worlds live side by side, the world of the sun and the world of the rain. Actually nothing dies here, everything continues into the next generation. Still, the heat doesn’t want to know anything about it and in a moment all can expire, can extinguish in the leaden sheath of drought. Then time begins to eat itself, it dies. But as soon as rain fall, it is as if nothing happened. Road to rain, road to grass, road to life. Extinct roads which are born again.

Afterlife at the crossroads of death and a new birth of the roads of life. It is a magic stick with two ends; everything is born with the sun and rain and everything dies without them. Circle of life. Road of love. Everydayness that won’t be repeated. Here every day is a new life. Every day is lived forever. In the morning when the savanna wakes up, the dance of the day begins. Everything moves, hops, or stops for a while wonderingly and continues again. Does anyone know how to describe the misenscène records of that fascination? And a yellow covering of flowers will remind us that it is spring now and life grows together with the grass. But it grows in the hell of future heats. They know how to conquer all. To transform the savannah in an unclear mass which like an extended fungus tiredly sticks to its shadow. And when the clouds descend low and narrow down the space between the sky and the earth, and there is an eagle flying nearby, be aware that something will happen. And who can tell what happens in the souls of the hyenas? They run and run. They pass each other, go and return again. Everywhere around them are roads. As if they were born on them. Roads of roads, crossroads of life which roll as a ball for which no one knows where it started from and where it will stop. From time to time some subdued laugh of a hyena can be heard, looking distrustfully left and right and continuing again. It will continue along its imagined paths, or it will join other hyenas in case they run along the same path. But aren’t the paths spirits of the sun, rain and time moving under their feet, or is the uncertainty of life reflected in their worried eyes only? Still, sometimes they are startled by the sound of wheels from some vehicle, to warn them that everything comes from the sky and ends underground, just as the first acquaintance and the last goodbye. At noon when the sun is vertically high and the engine of animal buzz turns off, a weary silence begins in which only dry trees can breathe safely. But in the evening it is as if nothing ever happened. The everyday birth of life will begin again. In this countdown scale maybe some miraculous potion will bring the man back to the savannah, to the prehistory of his soul, in order to share his common home with everyone; without cities, streets, concrete, erasing roads,crossroads, frontiers... Only then will the savannah return its skin on its own wounded body. And through all that the wilderness full of love and uncertainty will be born again. When the heart of nights again fills with moving shadows of the trees, this world won’t sleep and will wait with an open soul for the sun to be born. 313

Kenya

Tanzania 314

Man is locked in a prison and animals are free in a cage. Kenya

They painted zebras at the pedestrian crossing, a passionate hunter was shooting at their skin. Kenya

Human environmental error ñ overpopulation. Kenya

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The Earth ñ a planet that spins to its end.

Tanzania

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Judging by my instinct, they are right to call me an animal.

Tanzania

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LIFE AND DEATH

In the distance the wobbly line of the river outlined on the horizon.

“Life and Death” is the story of a friendship between a gnu and a buffalo. Being born close to each other on the territory of the Maasai Mara reserve, Kenya they became friends. After that, each of them follows its own life path. Time passes and they grow old. Shortly before the end of its life, driven by the instinct of death the buffalo heads towards the banks of the river Mara hoping to see its friend gnu for the last time. But the gnu died a few hours before the buffalo arrives, and finding its friend dead, the buffalo died the same day beside it.

He ran and ran along the marathon of life and under his hoofs the rogue grass watched the dark colossus as a condensed black cloud flying over it as a rounded bird. Ah, those flowers and shadows, shadows of memories, shadows of hope that their friendship was hiding in the swaying twigs, in the vast meadows full of grass. Everybody was carrying the fate of his life in himself. But they somehow knew that towards the end of their lives they would meet again. To try and find in their hearts the word farewell. To remind one another that they grew up together, next to each other when they were young. The instinct was leading them both towards the river now. The gnu with the goal of crossing it over and the buffalo to say goodbye to him for the last time.

When rain fell and the soil by the river turned to mud and small water pools, the gnu herds were already headed for Mara, leaving the trail of their hoofs, which the sun burned into the dried up land. This was the novel of life which has been repeating in the Serengeti for millions of years. Each year they would cross the river and return back again. Under the tropical sun the rich landscape full of life extended and shrank as a luxury net spread out in the huge expanse hiding the secret of how it all happens. And so does our story begin. Before the great migration began, near Kilimanjaro a little gnu and a little buffalo were born. The proximity in which they lived made them friends, without them even knowing it, while they ran each with its own herd. Their friendship simply remained a secret to the end of their lives. There was joy, their youth was easy and they were part of the happiness of the savannah. But the happiness of the two small creatures did not last long. First, the mother of the little buffalo was torn apart by a pack of lions, after which exactly the same thing happened to the gnu’s mother. Thus each of them set out on its life’s journey. That is the eternal rule of the savannah. That same savannah often is the birth mother and the death mother as well. When the rain season came the river poured out of itself with increased anger and then, when the sun scorched the scenery it squeezed itself, shrunken and powerless to the bottom of its riverbed. Then the grass and the small trees surrounding Mara, together with the animals anxiously looked for salvation without knowing where to find it. The gnu has long lost his herd and all that was left between him and the river was the savannah. Previously, the great gnu herds were already on the other side of the river.

On the road to the river near its bank, in a small green pond he met a jolly, curious duckling. Their two good souls befriended almost instantly, as if they knew each other forever. He moved slowly along the edge of the pond and the duckling skillfully hopped first left then right. Nobody knew how that happened in the first place. And why was it necessary to be known? He no longer felt his old age. In the mist of that near-death act the form of friendship quietly floated around. Suddenly it seemed to him that the dead body of his friend turned into music that was coming towards him. The music of remembrance. And maybe it was the eternal silence that had already began to cover them both. After that shadows appeared, horrendously trembling on the ground, followed by a small red flower over the skull of his friend and trees trunks whose swaying enriched the tropical wind, closing with the tree of their friendship which ended upwards with its crown towards the sky... And the hippos were under water one moment and the very next they presented themselves as small movable islands. After several years the feeling of death brought them back together once more. It happened here, on the banks of Mara, among the crocodiles, the hippos, the gushing water and few tree-trunks thrust into it, ominously staring around. His instinct led him towards the river, towards his childhood friend. There he had the biggest chance to meet him again. Even for the last time. His aged legs barely carried his huge torso and his horns which were the most beautiful in the whole savannah.

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But the death monster has long been crawled up into his body as a deadly metal insect. Next, it seemed to him that the sand was a ghost come here to take him elsewhere, but did not know where he would be carried off, towards the sky or under the river bottom. But was the river water magic that strongly attracted him, or it was a false hope that the same river water will take him to the other side where he will be safer? The gnus that had crossed the river earlier were already far away. But the water enticed him. The river which was grown into the savannah’s soul was the last hope that he will be able to reach the gnu herds once again. He was not even thinking about the gushing river and he simply voluntary gave himself to destiny. Nevertheless, the gushing water, the steep stone blocks and his broken leg had kept him prisoner forever. It was only a matter of time when the fatal hour will come upon him. The curtain of life readily waited to come down. All of a sudden the scenery thickened. There was the kingdom of the lions and the other predators and only stronger animals went into the low trees or shrubs. The wind here swayed the branches mixed together with shadows and one would get an impression that their rustle together with the wind was a sinister sign of something bad about to happen. But still the strongest of the savannah colossi carelessly went in there. Maybe those were the houses of the savannah, only without any windows or doors, and those that got inside them could disappear in a second. It was as if here there were no interchanging seasons of rain and sun, instead there was only the perennial wind season. Sometimes it was mild and gentle and sometimes cruelly hidden among the branches which trembled from its breath. But the shrieks of the eagles were letting him know that now he was the main drama for everybody around. The crocodiles, as if deeply asleep, secretly waited for their live feast. For some of the eagles the corpses of the dead gnus were more than enough but some of them were tempted by his movement. On the small island he felt as if in an opened prison, squeezed by the hope to survive on one side and death on the other. On the sand were the vultures and on the shore were the crocodiles, both of them watching their prey. His feeble body and broken leg were nearing their end. He was surrounded only by vertigos and despair. Everyone around him was preparing to give him the fatal blow. As time passed his hope was disappearing bit by bit. So he decided to do the inevitable. He started the small river slit towards the shore. The water there was troubled with mud on the bottom

and from both sides of the slit there were short stone monoliths. When he stopped short at the first part of the small slit, he noticed right away that the river continued to carry the bodies of the dead gnus. Nevermind, he carried on fighting until death. Still death won. It won but it lost the win to be present at the last moment of a friendship. The buffalo was already there but it was too late. Their soul was forever filled with blackness. And without even being aware of it he suddenly felt the hot blood running down his nostrils. And he just stood and stood there. So mute as if he had marble running through his veins. He had blizzards and horrible winds of remembrance blowing through his heart filled with pain. Ah, where was his youth now, where was the swaying grass of the savannah? Did everything have to happen this way? During that final moment he suddenly thought there was music coming out of the gnu’s body and it was moving towards him, music written by the hand of their friendship. And so he too found his relief before death. He climbed a little bit higher on the bank, looked for the last time towards his friend and became part of eternity. Forever. But, old age has started to pull him backwards long time ago. As he was moving towards the shore he stopped in front of a pond ingrown with green grass and there he befriended a small bird. The dialogue began instantly. The small gentle creature with its delicate wings hopped joyfully left and right next to the strong giant. And his soul was filled with warmth and pure goodness towards it. After that the buffalo continued along his way. He could see the river bank showing itself on the landscape. Passing through the fog of destiny, without knowing how it all happened in the first place, he found himself in front the dead body of his childhood friend. The gnu was lying in the small river slit, on the stone monolith. And they both wanted to meet before they died, they wanted it so much. Over them vertically was the tropical sun and under the buffalo was the elongated shadow of his neck directed towards his dead friend. Swimming powerlessly along the gushing river the fate of the gnu was writing its history. There were crocodiles on both sides of the river so the exhausted gnu went towards the water where the unmovable hippos were. They were now protecting him from the crocodiles instead of attacking him in defense of their territory. They must have felt that he was completely powerless and weak. He stayed there for quite a while until he was chased away from the exile asylum by a young hippo. And he had nowhere left to go.

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All he had left in front of him was the small island. Now was the time when he must face the death monster. On the left and on the right were the dead bodies of the gnus and around them were the vultures which were all over their prey. Some of the eagles would unpredictably fly over his head, hinting his immediate death. And nothing was clear to him. Should he go forward or backward on the island. And the island itself was so small. In a moment he would turn left and right searching for a salvation and a brief moment later he would again become aware of the destiny that awaits him. In that part of the river, Mara had its secret. Sometimes the sand from the island would drop under the water, sometimes it would emerge in small piles of earth and sometimes it would turn into an elongated surface of sand. It had nothing on it, not even a single grass grew on it. Only grey sand controlled by the mighty hippos which were often accompanied by two small ducks.

He was so tired that he wasn’t aware whether his body or his spirit was the one that walked the road to the river. Anyway, in the end he managed to notice that he was now walking along the river bank. Just a short moment ago, in front of a small shrub, with worry in his eyes he looked at his wounded leg for the last time. From time to time he would stop and look at it carefully as if something could be done. Realizing nothing could be done he would continue, helplessly limping away. And the mighty river was here. He was afraid that that same river was going to take him down to its water insides with all its power. And he knew that he had no power left for anything at all. The only thing he knew was that he must try to get across the river. Even if it was for the last time. He felt the dry wind in his nostrils telling him that there was drought coming. And the gnu herds from both banks of the river were long gone. There were no gnus or other animals around that were preparing to cross the river. So he would have to be he only victim if it came to that. But hope overcame fear and he just went into the water, exhausted and with an injured leg. Under him was the water which was pulling him in the deep and above him were the wet rocks, and their slippery, insecure surface. On both sides of the river there were crocodiles and near the small island the hippos were lying around, completely still. Suddenly something unpredictable happened. Instead of attacking him in defense of their territory, the hippos actually shielded him from the crocodiles. He just stood like that for hours and hours without even moving a bit, and it seemed as if time stood still. He stood hopelessly like that in the shallow water and his legs were almost glued from the mud. From time to time he would look left and than right after which he would look hopelessly into the water. Inside the riverbed the water was pierced by the underwater rocks and trees, and the dead bodies of the gnus that didn’t make it to the other side were piled up as morbid forms of painful outcries.

But now something unpredictable happened. Hundreds of dead gnu bodies were floating in the river, and some of them would end up washed out on the small island. And so the drama of this unique landscape was enriched. The sharp eyes of the vultures could recognize the rich prey of their future feast from afar. They lowered one after the other, jumped here and there or moved as if they were living ghosts among the dead bodies. When it rained and the ground around the river turned into mud and small ponds, the great gnu herds were already on their way to Mara, leaving their hoof prints in the moist mud. And after that the sun often sealed them into small holes in the dried earth. That view in the wonderful Serengeti has been repeating itself for millions of years. They would pass it and then return again, here, under the tropical sun and the vast grasslands full of life. All this secret shrank and expanded as a glorious net stretched between light and darkness, hiding inside itself how everything happens. That is how our story begins.

The river in front of him was a bridge and an abyss at the same time. To cross it or to fall down in it. Along its left and right bank deeply carved in itself, here and there were few bigger rocks or parts of some rocks thrown around without any order, as well as fallen tropical trees trunks at which there could be seen a dead corpse of a stuck gnu or even several of them piled up one over another as if they had an agreement to travel away together. And that was the way in which that furious landscape, talking about the pain before the death spasm of the animals, captured the drama of the despair which happened here before. And the river ruthlessly continued to carry away what has happened in it just moments before.

We are at the beginning of the great migration and all this happens near Kilimanjaro. Here a small gnu and a buffalo were born. The fact that their herds were so close to each other made them friends without even knowing they were. Running side by side made the wind of friendship enter their hearts and stay there forever. The joy was there and naivety made its thing. They were running around carelessly, protected by their herds. Tired and thirsty he was moving through the valley filled with skeletons of different animals and their heartbreaking face expressions were a mute witness of their last spasm before death took over.

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Kenya

Tanzania 322

Tanzania

He who kills with pleasure does so without mercy.

Tanzania

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Tanzania

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Kenya

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STEPS

his film was shot in the fashionable city of Knokke in Belgium. The entire action of the film takes place in a small space between a gallery and the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. One day, while I was drinking coffee from a small plastic cup, quite unintentionally I began to imagine the small plastic cup as the soul of a little helpless being. And is there anything that can inflict tremendous pain of the soul, except injustice? And so that little plastic cup of coffee left in the sun, rain, wind and sand that was constantly moving back and forth was experiencing everyday human destiny. At one point someone would kick it away, at a second one a bicycle wheel would pass over it, at a third one the wind would relocate it. It is more than obvious that this resembled human destiny. Well, isn’t life a set of steps?

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Knokke, Belgium, 2014

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If you love your child, teach it not to be like you.

329

To Einstein, my opinion is relative.

My wifeís name is Antigone, and my marriageís name is Tragedy.

330

La Scala in Milan sings, and Richter scale shakes.

Tesla transformed me into a transformer.

331

Of all my friends the most loyal is my shadow.

Be a shadow in silence, inside it is the music of your soul.

332

Think freely about the freedom of thought.

The next tsunami will be called Tide.

333

A well-tanned Martian is green.

Mountains appear small from afar, while men from up close.

334

Love is a drug to which I am addicted.

The environment would remain healthy if people did not descent from humans.

335

Mr. handyman, do you have a tool to fix my mistakes?

My sweet beauty, I swim for you in a salty sea.

336

Man is a good electrical conductor, and even a better insulator.

As long as you are above me, I wonít be able to come down to your level.

337

Enrich the day with more illusions.

Beware of powerful friends, or youíll get even more powerful enemies.

338

If you donít believe me, Iíll complain to God.

Piranhas attack where there is blood, and interest where there is money.

339

Love cannot age, it can only die.

He who rules by force is hated, he who rules with his mind is respected, and he who rules by kindness is loved.

340

Be short, the long way is uncertain.

My neighbor is a verified democrat, he put a ring on his nose to make it easier for his wife, who pulls him every day. 341

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PLANET

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LIGHT Viewers, listeners and readers, you are present on the day of wisdom, before you Plato is seated on the throne of the State, Shakespeare rhymes with Hamlet on the wall, Goethe christens his devil Mephistopheles, Sophocles weeps at Antigone’s birth, Pushkin challenges the Captain’s second daughter to a duel, Mozart using a lexicon studies the word note, Camus encounters the Outsider in himself... Viewers, listeners and readers, around all these acquaintances of ours, immortal mortals and mortal immortals who live and die by their own and others’ wills please resurrect the applause of the public in front of all the microphones and fraudulent charts... Viewers, listeners and readers, literate and illiterate alike, teachers, professors, deans, secret agents, spies and generals you are the living participants in the greatest sensation, you can see for yourselves that everywhere the halls are packed – in cities, on mountains, on oceans, and the cosmos has hired out its auditoriums – the halls of speech, of laughter and of ridicule, all the halls on the sun are packed, and all the halls in every constellation too, every star has sent its representatives, chroniclers, reporters, correspondents, every black hole has sent its representatives only the meteors will be in the role of observers. We are all waiting, they are all waiting while the temperature rises, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, we all want, we all desire wisdom’s representatives to say something... Plato has split into three parts, Shakespeare has become a brick in Hamlet’s wall, Mephistopheles devilishly exiles Goethe to hell, Pushkin is mortally wounded in order to win the heart of the captain’s third daughter, Antigone is transformed into the board of a stage at Sophocles’ tomb, Mozart’s dead body has been thrown like musical dust into an unknown grave, Camus did not know whether it was worse to be a Plague or an Outsider... But the representatives of all the planets, stars, meteors and comets, black holes and atoms were impatiently awaiting the word of wisdom: they were born, they lived and multiplied without knowing what death is, so much did they want wisdom to speak out, but wisdom lived out its own life easily, joyfully and thoughtfully, it was a LIGHT that was travelling timelessly into eternity.

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STAIN Do we know how long we had to travel to reach the chill of the wall, or have we forgotten to recall that our last farewell splashed like a bloody stain on the crumbling wall. Then the morello cherries bloomed and the demons danced their wondrous wedding dance. How many insects wafted then from flower to flower while our eyes blindly grasped the crevices in the dark, the cracks in our love that did not know how to speak that tender word. How our hearts were deafened by the density of the dark. A shadow was born on the sun, dark reigned on the moon, the stars guttered out in the silence of black graves. From that chill our hearts were left without streets or a window, while the healing herbs were dying in that gruesome sleep of the night. The troubled soul’s breath halted, the threshold of the sandstorms vanished, heavy leaden rivers began to flow in the deserts, lost shadows of dried-up trunks and woods intertwined, petrified trunks, roots and holes came alive, the balsam in those cells awakened in the fossils of the insects. Our eyes alone knew how to recognise the dried flower in the crevices in the wall. The cracks in the love that no longer understood its own speech. How did we manage to gather so much darkness into one place. Everything was heavy, everything shattered into metallic drops and in each drop wailed the sorrow of our stain. The seas vanished into a bottomless, waterless vapour sticky tendrils strangled the breath of the new-born flower. The oceans were heavy with a liquid pain and our bones broke askew in the frost of that despair. What was that gruesome beast constricting us within that knew the secrets of the wall that sentenced us and broke the thread of the whispers of our hearts? Did we not then pledge ourselves to the wind of God in the mountains of the night while behind windows of juniper a spring dew fell, soft snowflakes of stars clung to the curtains of our love and neither of us discovered how to utter that word of our hearts. So nothing was deceit between me and you, so nothing was a stain between me and you.

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RATS This is the platform of the great rats, everlasting lords born into death, underneath trains and metallic screech of rails. This is the platform of sorrow and love, of the great rats of the evil empire, of corridors that travel in trains of fog of the birds that fly one way along the corridors of fog, scattering the spirit of the wind. Birds, corridors and passages of fog. The lens of the eye peers anxiously here among the rats, the trains, the rails. The fog announces to us and to you: No escape. It is lord and master of our entrails. It is the shadow of our route. Look, there are the poets who are just crossing the threshold of the entrance. They want to be first to bid us welcome, last to say farewell. The rails rattle askew at the tread, the tread of trains arriving and departing within us. The new arrives, the old departs. Here is the ball of love rebounding off the walls of life that no one can catch, can touch. Here everything is secret and concealed, the platform of the great rats - a great secret. How many platforms and trains to their souls, how many platforms and trains to our death ask the shadows of the guards of the death that is born in them, ask the guards of all the secrets stifled there.

BODY O, my friend, I haven’t the strength to say good bye. Do you see the shadow of the woman in the night and the trance of the dance of her body? This evening the night is drunk with the dark, this evening the night is maddened by that body, by that body’s eyes that melt the night.

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THE BULL August burned bright in the yellow of the sand while the music gathered the hearts of all eyes. Trumpeters, trumpeters, the arena entreats you for quiet and for peace; The bull makes ready to dash out to his death and kiss the toreador who looks towards you, now before the fight begins, before the blade of silver flashes, look at the dusty whirlwinds that blaze in the eyes of the bull, How utterly beautiful he is, how black and how strong. His might moves in clouds of black shadows and ripples over the arena like a serpent’s tail. Here, left of the gateway, his hooves dig golden holes in the sand, his heart shatters into shards of ice at the sound of the trumpets that waken death. Should he weep or meet death proudly? In his soul he knows he is closed in and alone, only the dust beneath his feet moves as it chooses. A powerful light flashes for an instant in his sad eyes, he forgets the flaming red and his own blood, feels blinded and drunk on his childhood, remembers his mother. Oh fields, oh fields, how green you were, how fair: butterflies everywhere, mounds of soft earth all round. Oh fields of warmth and tenderness that charmed me! He recalls how he ran for the very first time, and everyone saw how light and fleet he flew. His mother wept with joy at her son – how fiery and fine he was. Ah, grass and butterflies, mounds of soft earth, bubbles of spring! This ominous music drives death to run at me. Look how the toreador lures me with his hidden sword, look at the shadows of death that gaze into your eyes, music, you’ve wailed long enough in my soul, you were born to life as I was. If only I could have said farewell to my mother, have taken leave of her yesterday. I know the fields would have wept at our meeting. It’s the grape-harvest now and the wine’s being pressed. Music, do you have a mother, or is death your dam? If that’s the way it is I too will kiss her. But wait, something grips at my heart, my mother has something to tell me before she dies. She dies tomorrow, I today – without knowing her secret.

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NUMBER After my death I’ll tell you how many decades I’m behind in writing telephone numbers in my notebook; it is grubby, long-suffering and old. I write and write in it, rubbing nothing out. My telephone notebook is a city of the living and the dead, the dead are born again and the same is true of the living. It is a city of friends, loved ones and chance encounters. Meetings there take place at any time of day. Everyone starts out there with everyone and everyone knows everybody else. New friendships are old, the old are new. There everyone writes himself in without rubbing anyone out. Noted like this the numbers are stamped on the skin of the day and together they write secrets they don’t even know. Since sincerity settles into them all they merge and crowd together, stretched out they set inner roads in motion. So number matches number and is fond of it, so number hushes number and comforts it, though when there’s no third number any more there’s no response from the number sought. So the numbers entered will always be alive in themselves, and the fates of the secrets will last together in the travellers through the gentleness in their pure souls, and it will always remain so as long as the numbers stay in it, and as long as they can be told: Always be good to your souls and as long as my body moves I will be a river that flows in you all. But when it is not so I too will become one of the numbers there.

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TRAIN Flee from the station without passengers there a cold wind blows in a draught Flee from the station without passengers both trains and rails flee from it flee from the station without passengers even oblivion is an extinct secret there flee from the station of remembrance there’s no one to see you there no one to hear you but if your soul comes back there often you be the train in which it will travel.

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Lucy’s Skeleton, Ethiopia

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Kiro Urdin’s Photography, Ethiopia

The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago.

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OMO VALLEY BY KIRO URDIN

ow should I begin the text? In the words of painting – with paint. Why is Africa called the black continent? I don’t know... and there are other areas located on the Equator. But... it is called like that everywhere...My last trip to Africa took place recently. In the plane bound for Ethiopia grave thoughts came over me; isn’t the world entering a critical phase? Everything is on the rise: crime, population, disasters, differences between the rich and the poor, the use of silicone breast implants, false smiles, poisonous waters in which we bathe, or we drink, the production of medicines... Planet Earth gave birth to man, and he does everything to destroy it.

It is the source of life for everything around it. I pass to the other river bank in a carved out dry tree trunk resembling a sailing vessel with a member of the indigenous tribe Hamer. Suddenly, he takes a small corroded bowl and dips water from the river. His face reflects pride, as if he wants to say that the entire river is like a pure source. In Africa the sun is plentiful and water is the mine of life. It is the privilege and magic prayed for by the holy spirits of the indigenous groups living here. That is reality and everyone respects water. After all, wasn’t life born in water? I pass the river in the dry carved out tree trunk, the river runs lazily, one would say that it moves within itself. On both banks the yellow-grey sand cover has hardened from the droughts. The trees are low and wildly outspread and only a single thicker trunk, immediately next to the shore, invades the space. It is dead and no birds stand on it... there are thousands of them around...but they are not like those of Hitchcock. Many coloured and joyous, they seem to move the blue sky over the magnificent landscape. Here secrets are mixed with everything. And when night falls, the sky turns to a huge lighted disk dotted with stars... but as soon as they go out, darkness swallows everything, like a black sticky ink. A black illusion of everyday reality...

There are no brakes in his hands anymore. Only money and money... And where is he? Where will future generations be? More and more robot is entering his soul. But the soul is no chemistry to be understood. It is a cloud which is all over. Inside and outside. Nowadays, things happen this way. Tomorrow is already today, and today may be forever. But let me begin with the main topic... I drink my first coffee in the small town of Jimka, in the area called Omo Valley. About ten years ago, at an airport in Costa Rica, coffee experts explained to me that the best coffee was being grown in Ethiopia. Another connoisseur of the same product, in the Paris Latin quarter, told me that the most expensive coffee comes from the Blue Mountain in the Caribbean island of Jamaica. A third professor, an ethnologist from London, claims that the people on that island originate from slaves brought from the same country in which I now drink my coffee, and I, even without wanting, called to mind Usain Bolt. And I say to myself – everything seems to be coming from there. But let us also mention the first Lady Lucy. The parts of her skeleton that have been uncovered have already become an archeological legend. As we all know, she also comes from the same soil. But let me get back to the Omo Valley area. The word wonderful is not enough to describe it. There are two national parks. The first one is Mago and the other one carries the name of the area which we are discussing, Omo Valley. Mago can be said to have been created for the adventurists and the second one to have been intended for the masochists. In the middle of the above mentioned area the river Omo runs as a lazy, wriggling python.

My guide and I have just entered the small hotel in the Turmi settlement. It is a one storey hotel. In the middle of the yard there is something resembling an improvised balcony, a young girl is serving coffee, tea, or something to eat. The walls of the rooms are painted in bright green and yellow. In any other place they would have been kitsch, but here they are a harmonious part of the space. A hotel room costs twenty dollars. It has a bed and nothing else. The water in the sink stingily flows for a short period of time, but it doesn’t have to be like this always. There is drought all around, or something resembling it. And the herbs, the shrubs, the low trees have adapted to survive in part of that space. I say to myself, in which code of life does the secret of this all lie? It’s evening time. I sit on the threshold when a small frog jumps in front of me. From experience I know that in Europe they live in damp places or where there is water, but here frogs live in drought. Strange frogs... or I might be ignorant. I order an omelette and the second course on the everyday menu, which is pasta with finely chopped cattle meat. Ah, what an omelette.

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Here one can still find the members of the “tribes”: Mursi, Bodi, Kwego, Muguri, Ari, Banna, Hamar, Arbore, Karo, Surma, Dime, Konso... they persevere, they live. To see and experience these wonderful members of these ethnic groups is a genuine warm shock for every heart. Some of them have their skin engraved, others have it painted and the rich variety of additional decorations helps to enrich their beauty even more. Naturally spontaneous people, as if their heart is expressed through their smiles and with a direct look, which today is increasingly rare to find, they have nothing to tell. They are what they are, here on their own territory, on the dried off land inhabited by the ghosts of their ancestors. The discovered skeletons bear witness to a period of two or three million years or more of life on this continent.

Here domestic animals are wild. They live freely in the surroundings that are still as they always used to be. The following three days that I spent in the hotel I ate only omelette, paired, of course, with several coffees. People here are black, but only until they smile. Then their teeth shine with whiteness, even more beautiful than that of ivory. Here a white person would seriously think about whether to smile. And we shouldn’t even mention the direct look and its sincerity. These people are neither naïve, nor ignorant. They have the power to understand something before it happens. Therefore, for thousands of years they have survived hunger, drought, floods... There are many laws in life that people in industrial surroundings cannot understand. Even if they do understand them, they will not understand the reason why they are such. The modern man has simply detached himself, as the bark does from its trunk and does no longer resemble his own self. But birds alight on the trunk and the branches, not the bark.

The Homo sapiens originated here, just like the above mentioned Lady Lucy. It is from here that modern man took off into his progress, and he returns with machines to destroy the archeology and the archeological testament of his own soul, forever burying his own genetic tree... Here I remember a certain thought saying: “The more I get to know people, the more I love animals” and I begin to wonder whether he was thinking of contemporary people. But this is in the nature on man. To create and to destroy. Therefore, sometimes history goes forward and sometimes it goes back. Actually, death here has another dimension. These simple people, with an authentic culture, are on the verge of final extinction. Firstly, due to the inevitable conflicts between them and secondly, much more terrifying, due to the power of capital and financial centers that direct things from the outside and transfer evil to their own ground. Unfortunately, they are not that numerous, the number itself marginalizes them.

In short, everyone that has come here becomes a part of the landscape. He adopts the pigments of this world’s spirit which does not ponder why things are as they are. There is simply no need to do so. Here there are no parking lots, no taxis, no traffic tickets, no noise. Life extends between the sun, the space and the clean air. But it is no longer like that! A few kilometers further, huge bulldozers butcher the wild space. A new road is being built. Africa is adjusting itself to being even more strongly colonized. Economically. The great forces need ores and raw materials; they keep their own reserves jealously. It is said that their main interests are the diamonds, naturally as a counter-favour. But who needs those? The truth is completely different, and the still unstable government institutions have difficulty coping with this phenomenon. Modern life begins to tighten its grip on the continent which is the birthplace of the Homo sapiens and wipes out the treasury of its genetic tree and without it the world will no longer resemble itself. It becomes a global victim of information. They’ll go forward, but they will be left without themselves! And without authenticity the world will no longer be the same. Yet, we have to admit that these people also have the right to water, electricity, medicine, education... And this is reality. Then, where is the middle? Nowhere! It moves and shifts. Just like life. There is no going back. Yet, behind all this there is nostalgia.

And let us not even begin to talk about the political means which they have at hand. If I continue writing on the topic, a much, much longer text would be needed. Therefore, I will make things shorter. I’ll try to say some information through photographs. Despite the physical difference and even the linguistic one, they have something in common. The belief. Their religion can be said to be pagan, but they believe in the force of the cosmos. Everywhere around them and above them are the holy spirits of their ancestors that can transform into stars, rain, wind, drought... They follow and protect them, but they can also punish them.

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MY LORD O Blacks, slaves of the blues how soft and white the fields from the cotton in bloom. Smoking nights in the breathing light black music summon you! Slaves of the cotton leaves, your soul is free and fair: It is the soul of the Lord that breathes in the soul of your music.

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Bushman

Himba Lady

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Siemens mountain, Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Dallol Volcano, Ethiopia

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Great Salt Lake, Ethiopia

Dallol Volcano, Ethiopia

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Ethiopia, Gelada Monkey

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Ethiopia, Kiro Urdin and the Rangers - Expedition

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China, 2011

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China, 2011

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Film Festival, China, 2011

Film Festival, China, 2011 388

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HYENA In the metropolis, the hyena sickly howls and no one knows whether it breathes or moans, and the wheels of the car trample its soul through the eyes and thus the people rushing everywhere in a dense smoke they spread life and seek the hyena to put it in a cage, and they don’t know that their metropolis was a savannah once and they do not want to fulfil its longing, and for the hyena to die in the savannah, at the place of its birth.

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SELF-PORTRAIT

y earliest knowledge begins with my greatgrandfather, Constantine. I don’t know what my great-grandmother’s name was. They came from Salonica and had fourteen children, twelve of whom died one after the other. The thirteenth was my grandfather, Vasil, and the fourteenth his sister, Tina. My father was called Michael and my mother Makedonka, as is my daughter. But to begin with myself.

years passed and peace reigned everywhere. Countries were transformed into flower gardens. There were no more wars, no more dead, wounded, starving... There was no injustice, evil or force. When I completed my studies everybody started to judge me. In order to improve my rating, I started with legal norms, and fell headlong into the loopholes in the law. There they convinced me that life beyond the grave can easily be buried. Because I had little patience for documents I began to paint them and then to record them on film. This same fact had undesirable consequences that started to multiply. Their number increased so rapidly that there wasn’t room for them all any more. The only way out was to surrender my space to them. The consequences demanded that I should understand their causes. So on average I became a point, so that nobody noticed me any more. Now my destiny depends upon the place where they insert me in their written texts. But if anyone asks me what my wish is, my response is this: because I am a point I don’t want to remain in any one place but to be in perpetual motion.

I am average in all things: of average height, of average weight, of average years and the colour of my hair is average. My mother and father were average too. And of course my three brothers and my sister are average. I wasn’t present at the moment of my birth. Time moved fast then. During the First World War my father was still a child, but even then he had made up his mind that I would be his youngest son. His wish was fulfilled towards the end of the Second World War. It was the month of May and three fortune-tellers told me that the flowers were still smelling of gunpowder. After that moment a good many

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If the very first step is victorious, such victory is equal to defeat. No less, no more, just enough for harmony. To love constellations, the universe is a dot. Philippines, 2000

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Colours are magic, magic is power, power is blindness. The three rules of grammar: write concisely, write clearly and keep on doing it. Judge the sublime, the rest is error-free.

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Sweden, Helsingborg

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Kiro Urdin’s Atelier

Jerusalem

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Kiro Urdin, Maui, Hawai 400

Kiro Urdin, Аcapulco

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Tanzania

Kiro Urdin and Brand Ferro

Pablo Ferro, Kiro Urdin, and Vladimir Petrovski

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Tanzania, Serengeti

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Kiro Urdin, Vladimir Petrovski and Pablo Ferro

Kiro Urdin, with the friends in Maui

Kiro Urdin, Maasai guide and Brand Ferro

Maasai Dance 406

OMO VALLEY People Ethiopia

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Donna Urdinov and her parents, Kiro and Mirka

Donna Urdinov, 2018, L.A. Zbrush Live Sculpt-off, Organic Entries Winner: Donna Urdinov (The Empress) 2019, L.A. Zbrush Live Sculpt-off, Winner: Donna Urdinov

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Gerard H. Meulensteen (President of the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum), Video presentation about Planetarium

at Van Abbemusewum Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Donna Urdinov

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Luciano Pavarotti, Mr. Pieter van Vollenhoven, Kiro Urdin and Andrea Griminelli

Baron and Baroness Enrico and Sandra Portanova, Acapulco

Henry Kissinger and K.U., Acapulco

Gerard H. Meulensteen

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Anatoli Karpov, Corinne Timsit and Kiro Urdin

Kiro Urdin and Guy Pas, Geneva

Jovan Pavlevski, Kiro Urdin and Anatoli Karpov

Kiro Urdin and Mick Freetwood

Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac Band)

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Nelly Benmoha

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Mihail Urdin, Kiro Urdin’s father, Thessaloniki, 1938

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Kiro Urdin, Paris, 1987

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biography

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