The idea that the geographical landscape permanently determines the spiritual landscape, is best confirmed by the paintings made by Jordan Manasijeski, where “couleur locale” ( or the local colour) is represented in its shine and beauty. Manasijeski has built his painting style upon the romantic and ecstatic experiences of the Ohrid area. That is the reason why his paintings are full of water elements. Let’s remind ourselves what Gaston Bachelard wrote: “The past of our soul is the deep water”. The place where Manasijeski was born is not just a simple place on the geographical map, but it is something alive and organic, living human core from which the strength of something healthy, deep and renewing pours out. This artist respects the nature as a visible presence of cosmic forces. Manasijeski as every other authentic landscaper, matriarch has an extraordinary erotic attitude towards the water, the grass, the lump of soil, in other words the elements from which the nature consists, as well as towards the ancient writers Magna Mater, The Great Goddess (The Great Mother).
A few decades by now, Jordan Manasijeski, is considered as one of the most refined painters of figurative confession from this area, who visually enriches and deepens his obsessive world. Manasijeski is not interested in the reportage, documentary description of the Ohrid landscape, but he is interested in the expressive coloristic music which he uses to represent the Ohrid environment as a space of happy and mystical existence. On his paintings the expressive gestures prevail over the intimate plans. Through the expressionistic gesture and an arcadian coloristic eroticism, and also by playing with the light, he succeeds in creating a lyrical magic on his canvas.
In other words, the artistic expression of Jordan Manasijeski is rich, with dramatic accents, where the drama of the landscape creates a vibratory rhythm of the move. The fast and energetic dramatic vibrancy of his painting style is fascinating, in which the forms are dissolved and the space is structured on the painter’s field. I think that it would not be a mistake to say that Jordan Manasijeski’s paintings are a chromatic emblem of Ohrid. This painter reveals us the Ohrid landscape as a valuable endemism. His canvases radiate the fullness of the abundance, the fragile wealth of an area, a great enlightenment out front the magical heaviness of the nature. In that way this artist reveals the beauty of these regions, which for their existence have to be grateful to their creator.
Manasijeski is a painter of the Mediterranean spirituality and light which brings some bodiless, not physical entities. An Arabic wisdom says that the Mediterranean reaches as far as there are olive trees. The Manasijeski’s landscape is a state of the soul- it is lit up by an intimate, spiritual light. His landscape is divine; godly-it is a subject of a cult, adoration. This pictures show one sunny world that burns under the heat of the Mediterranean light. Manasijeski indulges into the landscape, but he never treats it directly and scrupulously, but searches for and as a rule always finds the most prominent moments of the atmosphere. That is the reason why on his canvases everything vibrates and shimmers, and at the same time they are defined with clean and clear style. These canvases attract us with their extraordinary “coloristic music”. Just looking at them we can feel the smell of the Mediterranean, the lavender, rosemary. We enjoy the open, blue sky that reveals its secrets. Jordan’s painting, that beautiful feast on the sun, tree tops and smells that circulate around it, shows the artist’s ecstatic openness towards the Mediterranean light. And truly everything that this artist does is enriched with the mystery of the Mediterranean, with a Mediterranean ideal of beauty, and with supernatural aura of fairy tales. We are of Mediterranean religion, this artist reminds us, and so the light can radiate from itself only at those who also contain the light within themselves, in their soul.
Manasijeski skillfully uses the experiences of the divisionism from Paris school as a derivate of the French impressionism. The thick, short moves depict the shimmering of the air, that shimmering tuning of the leaves on the top of the trees, the vibration of the light in the shimmering air, the game of sunny spaces and shadows. On these paintings there are no noisy effects, but everything is directed, the moves are vibrant and there is impressionistic atmosphere, shimmering of the light that suggests illusion of the space. The atmosphere here is astounded by the impression of space onirity. The plans are freely differentiated with rich and exciting paste, unsettled and almost three dimensional. These paintings are juicy, but with noble facts as enamel, fully told to the end with style, with delicate range of green, dark blue, purple, ochre and yellow. The magic of Jordan Manasijeski’s paintings, above all is in the tuning and the atmosphere of his plain-air (open air) which bathes in the sunlight. Here the air is alive, filled with microbeless, Mediterranean light and haze with high ethereal.
Chesterton says that the man in his soul has shades of many more weird, colourless and nameless colours, than the colours of the forest in the autumn. One such prolific pictorial treasure strews upon us from the Manasijeski’s paintings. His allegoric and contemplative romanticism is a result from the roots of Eden and the mythological poetic projections of the Mediterranean landscape enchanted by the dance of the light and shadows. The particular objects are canvases, with extraordinary complex register of lights, relit with one bright, lyric elevation, far from the rational calculations. A brightness which is eminently Mediterranean, rises on Jordan’s canvases to a level of metaphysical “myth for the eternal return”. Manasijeski explores that mystical constellation between the Mediterranean landscape and the secret depths of the being that absolutely tempt him. The beauty of his oniric views is in their ethereal, lyrical evasion and the cleansing from the world that may destroy its harmony and balance. In all that they evoke spaces of one’s happy existence, but also an obsession with the dark, hidden, nettled.
On these canvases we can notice a happy balance between craftsman’s skills and the nature of the artist’s spirituality. Namely, Manasijeski is not a slave of the reality, description and shapes that can be easily read. His paintings are well dressed but not arranged and ironed. The lyric intimate contemplation fully marks Jordan’s painting. This artist is interested in the oniric, archetypical regions, extraordinary complex registers of light and shadows. The magic and the metaphor of Jordan’s paintings are in the unusual beauty of the ratio among the tree, the earth and the sky, in their imperceptibility, but also in the divine touch.
Today we live in an era when the art becomes more and more metal, colder and more sterile. We live in an age where the rational and technological thought suppress the romantic and the magical one. On the contrary, the artistic world of Jordan Manasijeski is knitted with neo romantic ideal of the universal term of beauty and devotion to the classical painting medium. On his canvases we can find pieces of the striving for the world to become romantic again and the paintings to show that the beautiful is nothing else than “blossoming of the being”, a tale of the magical conception of the nature. We can find that blossoming of the being on Jordan’s paintings with refined artistic aestheticism, on the canvases that again return us in our own forgotten floral nature.
DRAGAN JOVANOVIKJ DANILOV
Belgrade, Srbija
07.06.2019