Not a Surrealist

Ljuba Popović is described almost everywhere as a Surrealist, or a fantastic, or a visionary painter. The description is contested — including, and most firmly, by the painter. He arrived in Paris in 1963, too late to know André Breton, whom he never properly met, and by his own account was too independent to join any group. He was celebrated by Surrealist writers — André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Patrick Waldberg, Alain Bosquet, Alain Jouffroy, Sarane Alexandrian — without ever adopting Surrealist doctrine.

He located his own work instead in peinture intégrale, integral painting: an outgrowth of Mediala’s attempt to synthesise Renaissance tradition with modern thought. He said repeatedly that the only real subject of his painting had always been painting itself, and denied any figurative or narrative intention — a claim worth holding alongside canvases populated by demons, androids and death’s-heads, and deciding for yourself how much of it to believe.

Critics generally place him in the broad tendency of fantastic realism or visionary art, rather than in the politically driven Figuration Narrative that dominated Paris in the same decades. It is a useful distinction: his subject was never the news.

What the paintings do

Large-format oils, made by a technique that alternates brushwork with paint applied by the bare hand, over layered tempera and gouache grounds. Female bodies dissolve into clouds of luminous particles. Hybrid creatures, mutants and androids share the space with haunted forests, threatening architecture, mysterious lakes and cosmic voids. Death’s-heads and Baroque memento-mori motifs recur, as does Mannerist anamorphosis — a device he took up after seeing exhibitions on the subject and reading Jurgis Baltrušaitis.

Critics reached for Piranesi, Monsù Desiderio and Böcklin to describe the formal world. Mandiargues’s verdict of 1972 is the one that stuck, and it works by separating him from the obvious comparison: Ljuba is a painter of the warm hand, against Dalí’s ice-cold skill.

The dark pessimism critics identify in the work is usually traced to two sources: a childhood in Serbia where his maternal grandfather was locally famous for performing exorcisms, and a reading life that ran to Schopenhauer and science fiction in roughly equal measure.