DADO'S BEAUTIFUL HORROR
In Paris' Centre Pompidou one can encounter a fair amount of disturbing works. Yet there is one place in the museum that far exceeds the rest of the Centre's collection in its capacity to invoke pure terror: the room that is dedicated to the art of Miodrag Djuric, known as Dado. In this room one finds oneself surrounded by beautifully crafted, though truly terrifying canvases. Confronted with the Massacre of the Innocents (1958-1959), an undulating mass of blood, bowels, limbs, twisted faces and dead babies, a friend of mine said:
'This is the most disturbing painting I've ever seen – bubbling, hissing, angry, distorted, disgusting; a fever dream, a physical manifestation of evil... perfectly executed... it's magnificent.'
Art has always had the power to shock and stir, as it exposes human experience either through a looking glass, a telescope or a kaleidoscope. Especially the Surrealists created many haunting, bizarre and disturbing images. In their manifesto they stated the intention to bring to light previously repressed feelings and images in order to visualize the whole of human existence.
But the wish of the Surrealists to explore the chasms of the human mind was nothing new. In the 19th century Odilon Redon and Félicien Rops had unleashed hordes of haunting creatures on canvas, just like Goya and Fuseli in the 18th, Bosch and Breughel in the 16th, and Flemish Primitives, such as van Eyck and Memling, in the 15th century.
Dado's work, always classed as Surrealist, clearly belongs to this wider tradition of apocalyptic painting, something he articulated himself, as he cited all the above-mentioned artists as his predecessors and most important sources of inspiration. Yet somehow Dado has managed to create images that are more distressing than anything seen before. Another clear example of this hangs opposite to the Massacre of the Innocents: the Large Farm (1962-1963) is a painting that is totally different, yet just as vicious. From a distance it looks like an innocent French pastoral scene, be it with an unusual amount of activity, but when one focuses, one suddenly sees that all these creatures, conceived in such cheerful colors, are in fact hideous monstrosities – dead, decaying, screaming, suffering, coagulating, disintegrating...
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