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Fine arts, above all, the painting and graphic work of Lazar Vujaklija is very recognizable, compact and unambiguous. However, the current one retrospectively "Protest to Self", at the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina (MNMU, until the end of May), the authors of the exhibition, Vladimir Kokoruš and Danica Đorđević Janković, not only tried to thoroughly look at Vujaklija's work through 170 exhibited works borrowed from 20 museums and cultural institutions, but also inevitably reveal layers that may have remained incomplete even to Vujaklija's contemporaries, and which seem strangely exciting from today's perspective.
His recognizable expression in painting, graphics, tapestry and murals are characterized by clear colors and, at first glance, repetitive motifs of man, bird, flower, sun... inspired by stećci. He himself was educated as a bookbinder, which he did for the rest of his life, both as a master and as a lecturer at the Graphics School. However, before the Second World War, he completed an art course with Petar Dobrović, and over time he became friends with the big names of the local culture - Miodrag Protić, Đorđe Andrejević Kun, Oto Bihalji-Merino, Aleks Čelebonović - who knew how to direct Vujaklija's simple and strong expression to the general public. After a sudden breakthrough into the high circles of the art world, in the early fifties, a fruitful multi-decade career followed, marked by appearances at the Venice Biennale (twice), exhibitions of Yugoslav graphics that traveled the world, and murals on the Geneks Tower, as well as in the SIV Ceremonial Hall (opposite Lubard's mural).
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Summarizing her impressions of Vujaklija's oeuvre, curator Danica Đorđević Janković returns to the question of all questions, namely whether he is a bookbinder or a painter: "He was formally educated as a bookbinder," says Danica Janković. "After an informal course with Dobrović, he organized his first exhibition in 1952, and the following year he joined ULUS as a painter, so that in the fifties and sixties we would recognize his desire to be considered a painter and not a bookbinder. The key moment is his first mural from 1970 on the facade of Toma Grgić's bookbinder shop at Revolucije 159 (the mural on the wall of the MNMU was reconstructed by the artist Darinka for the purposes of the current retrospective) It seems to be a turning point in the construction of identity. At the very end of his life (he died in 1995), he says in an interview: 'I would never choose to be a bookbinder again, I would be successful. Do you know that I am an extremely good and successful bookbinder?'" And what was his attitude towards furnishing books? we ask Danica Janković "He approached the book as a form in which the content is central, and the equipment of the book adapts to the content. The most outstanding performance is his first illustration for the book, a collection of Pablo Neruda's poetry Woman's body from 1966, when he was introduced to new motifs of Latin American and Mesoamerican art. At the same time, he began to develop typography from the point of view of his own - bookbinding - profession. In an interview, he points out that the reason for using Latin is mostly pragmatic in nature, since Latin is used in most of Europe and beyond, and it is easier to find different Latin fonts. There were much fewer Cyrillic fonts, so Vujakliya believed that work should be done on their development (it was expensive and demanding). In his work based on stećak, he therefore develops his own Cyrillic font, which he later uses both in the monograph and in the maps..."
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With Vujaklia, therefore, there was a permeation of both of his passions at work. He made a total of three graphic maps inspired by literary works, which, through books printed for the general public, is the most famous part of his work, but also the closest to his sensibility as a bookbinder. "It's about maps Note about Darinka, which illustrates the text of Dušan Petrović Šanet, and Red poem according to the text of Dimitrije Nikolajević," says curator Danica Janković. "Both works are testimonies of tragic events during the Second World War. When we talk about maps, we talk about the synergy of words and images, we talk about content, even co-authorship. Vujaklija himself says: 'I don't know anymore if the words are illustrated by the picture or if the picture is an illustration of the words?' In this way, we are talking about developing a specific, liminal medium".
When asked if there was tension between his two vocations - painter and bookbinder - the interlocutor of "Vremen" says: "Among other things, Vujaklija was on a long study trip to Paris, and in an interview, speaking about the strongest impressions, he does not mention exhibitions, but says: 'I visited Parisian museums and we have all the same', which means that nothing was impressive enough for him even when he saw live what he had previously seen only as black and white reproductions. The biggest impression. was left to him by a bookbinder in Paris, the shop of an old, extremely respected bookbinder, with whom he enthusiastically talked and admired his work, even though he thought he was the best until then. This anecdote, in fact, reflects a critical attitude towards Western art, which he considered to exist in the highest art circles of Yugoslavia the position anticipates decolonial way of thinking, which implies epistemological and semantic cleansing in our knowledge, in language, in the approach to what we do. That cleaning, that kind of rejection of the meaning matrices that are colonial, is something that Vujaklija anticipated, at least intuitively through finding a painterly language in something that is inherent in this space, starting from stećaks, all the way to Pirot weavers, as a counterpoint to something that was imported. "What are the interpretations of his attitude?" we ask. "There were interpretations of his work in a national, even nationalist key, in the sense of returning to the roots, tradition, Christianity, returning to the folk, returning to folk art," says Danica Janković. "Nevertheless, in the light of the global events that followed, I think that the tendencies in Vujaklia's work show a closeness to decolonial thinking in which he does not adopt aesthetic values according to the modernist, western key, or Yugoslav-modernist, but remains loyal and consistent to his own, inherent values".
