Back in the 1980s, Slobodan Knežević wrote: "It has become clear to me that my  preference for analysis and elimination, as I see fit, of all inessential elements from the visual plan of the motif is in fact my creative process, my artistic preference and a vital characteristic. I feel that what I have to say as an artist can be expressed in the relationships between the surface and the rhythm of the lines, which remain the basis for the visual existence of the object, following wholesale elimination. I saw that I constantly tended to discover in an object that I take to be a unique visual and functional entity, what might be the motive behind my thinking when setting about the visual representation of that object." Clearly, the young artist, then at the outset of his creative adventure, came very early on to a full awareness of his creative processes, going about the reduction of his art consistently and with determination.  The earliest drawings from his student and early post-academic career show a wide range of interests, from elegiac interpretation of memories of home and his birthplace, a few works showing a Baconesque concept of figuration, all the way to the melancholy scenes of student rooms, dominated by lines that sprawl freely and independently across the paper without attempting to incorporate themselves in any precise way into a meagre setting of a scene.  All these drawings, however reduced and brought down to their essential content and visual structure, show a profoundly experienced autobiographical record, and are therefore the true visual sublimation of all that happened in the artist’s life up to the beginning of his creative activity. A small series of coloured felt pen drawings dating from 1976 represents the peak of Knežević’s early-acquired minimalism. Pure abstraction and a geometric, non-referential linearity dominate the drawings. Therefore, from the safety of hindsight, they may be considered a very special occurrence in the atmosphere of Serbian art of the time, as they are conceptually closer to the universal postulates of the "new tendencies" (Knifer, Srnec, Šutej, Picelj and others), than to the geometrical logic of the gradual reductionist process of the Belgrade "Decembar Group" (Ćelić, Protić, Tomašević and others). Although at this time of prelude the young Knežević’s reaction was simply intuitive, it rapidly became the  launching-pad for his further authentic visual art and graphic work.

The run-up period ended with the close of his ten years of study. In May of 1970, he gave a key exhibition in the Gallery of the Kolarčev Narodni Univerzitet, together with Milutin Dragojlović and Dragoslav Knežević. For the first time works from the "Doors" cycle were shown. The exhibition heralded a truly individual, coherent and already personalised grasp of graphics, a clearly defined creative philosophy, close to the modernist concept. Knežević’s primary endeavour was aimed at reducing motifs taken from reality to a self-actuating, aesthetic, visual sign, manifesting a perfection of execution which gives a clear impression of the artist’s readiness to carry out all his ideas and represent them to the spectator.  Even in these early graphics, he achieves a subtle synthesis of tehnē and poēsis ("For me the printing process is as important as the idea itself" ), which brings an exceptional tactile value to the graphic art, at the same time  making it "special" in the universal system of the visual arts.

The 1980s introduced a new atmosphere into art in Europe and the then Yugoslavia. A Slovene postmodern art critic concludes that "a period of demystification of modernism has arrived, some of its ideological mehanisms and manipulations have been exposed, while at the same time modernism has become a historical field through which one may travel like a nomad, picking up some of its forms or ideas and using them for various postmodern artistic projects". This proves useful in interpreting Knežević’s conduct during the 1980s. In October and December 1984 in the Novi Sad Visual Arts Salon of the Youth Forum, he exhibited for the first time a series of hand-made paper works (cartons). As precisely described by Dušan Đokić in the catalogue, Knežević’s kARTon is "a series of completely abstract or rather ‘concrete’ artefacts similar to ‘primary painting’ from the postconceptual sphere, but executed in a manner totally opposite to typical painting, miraculously retaining all the special characteristics, even the tones and colour values of a sumptuous pastel range." In addition, the kARTons were malleable, as they enabled the artist to form various combinations of colours and shapes on the spot while setting them up, thus achieving an effect that made it easy to gauge how exhilarated he was by international topics and international art in those those pre-crisis years of the eighties.

In contrast to the 1980s, in the 1990s the subjective-expressive wave was supplanted by rationalist concepts of geometry, construction and minimalism. Apart from that, the acute crisis engendered by the fall of Yugoslavia in the early nineties stamped this country with a "catastrophilic complex", as described by Peter Sloterdijk, the primary symptom being "aggravation of the social climate that is ... filled with schizoid tensions and ambivalences to the point of unbearableness". Knežević shows this ambivalence in his Works with Paper, which emerged in the ten years between 1992 and 2003. Rough, exciting, expressive, the almost relief-like structure of kARTons has built-in, geometrically defined surfaces and lines. This led Arsić to speak of the "rational bi-dimensionality" of these works, noting the surface as the primary feature. It is the surface, (flatness, plane) that Greenberg finds to be the basis for all modernist propositions. In this way, Knežević became part of the then current attempt at a discreet revival of the modernist idea (modern after postmodern, second modern, new modernism) in Serbian art after years of subservience to postmodernism. On these papers, Knežević’s lines and surfaces are so defined as to continue, from one work to the next, one following on another, to merge in a polyptych composite, so that they could be described as an installation, marking, denoting and (re)shaping the space in which the work is placed. Their vital feature is that the visible geometric drawings "ooze out" from inside, from the thickened body of the carton, from the material structure. This gives Knežević’s kARTons an uncommon tactility, rendering them persuasive, concrete, real and tangible.

A feature of Knežević’s opus of the late 1990s are the graphic panels which the artist exhibits as "valid" and representative exponents. From them the artist has taken impressions of his graphics in carborundum technique, juxtaposing imaginatively structured black surfaces against deeply embossed straight, gold lines. These graphics are usually defined in such a way that the artist has preserved the shape of the plate by excising the white margins. Thus imprint and plate become similar in appearance, showing the obvious difference between positive and negative. In addition to the structure of the plate impressed on the paper, the panel itself has an even more persuasive, firmer and more coherent appearance. This led Knežević to upgrade his panels to a full art work. He frequently exhibits them as dyptychs, with a visible line of separation, or as overlapping panels whereby, thanks to their unconventional formatting, one "slots into" the other. The result is very convincing and evocative – reduction, materialised structure, black – they look like the aesthetified, fatal marks of a time of long-drawn-out crisis, the echo of the oft-repeated conclusion that there was as yet "no light at the end of the tunnel."

Following the kARTons and the series of black panels, after 2000 geometry became the guiding concept of Knežević’s work. By gradual transposition, out of this environment came a series of drawing/paintings in acrylics on paper. First laying down a drab, monochrome background of dark terracotta, he paints broad geometric lines in sluggish rhythms and right-angled configurations. The result is a specific geometrical configuration, simultaneously personal but close to "the constructivist tendencies of the classical modern", as Jasmina Tutorov has noted.  The works testify to Knežević’s obsession with unearthing and offering order, concord and harmony in the midst of chaos. He deliberately invokes these principles of neoplasticism at a specific time, which may be understood as the act of a socially engaged artist wanting to oppose his ideas to the pervading atmosphere of distorted criteria and hopelessness. Here he makes no concessions: his geometry is formalistically pure, clear and precise.  Furthermore, the arrangement of the lines, the way they mesh, their positioning and interrelationship pulse with the artist’s sensibility. For there are times when Knežević’s geometry seems to us both logical and illogical; the directions in which the black lines spread out or break off, the conjunction of broad and narrow short lines, continuing or interrupted, bewilders us. At exhibitions, he will quite often extemporise, joining his drawings in a dyptych, tryptych or polytypch as it occurs to him, discovering what to him are logical links – which, in fact, are nothing other than the articulation of a state of mind, emotions and a feeling for measure at that particular point. This is what makes the artist’s excitement in these paintings on paper at questions of civilisation and events in our times as visible and quantifiable as a coordinate system.

A current development in Knežević’s art are his drawings on fibreboard. Here the lines are not drawn but carved with precision into the board. On the black and white panels the lines appear visible because of the contrasting colour of the inner material. Sometimes the artist fills the groove with colour, accentuating a new, different and – it may freely be concluded – more expressive matter. At the same time, the works raise serious questions about the medium of drawings. Lazar Trifunović has written that "the line is the most abstract visual element", not possessing the physical reality of colour, form or material.  Here Knežević engages in experiment, questioning the line, his drawings being composed of empty spaces and small channels where material was gouged out from the background. The act is certainly not speculative, and does not set out to prove anything in particular. The series is simply trying to discover novel models of draughtsmanship where the artist, guided by his own intuition, philosophises about the idea and status of the drawing.  Moreover, with the experience of a tried graphic artist, at one point Knežević took these drawings as a block print and printed off a series of extraordinarily precise graphics from them. The result is remarkable, unique in contemporary graphics in this country.  White-line configurations, executed with computer-like precision on a black background (printed on a press in traditional fashion) are brought to the concrete autonomy of a linear configuration, a creation which possesses its own formal and poetic individualism.  The Italian modernist critic, Filberto Menna, has said that "art has the right to its own individuality – not to become dissociated, but to offer its own example to serve as model for other arts and practices". Not only in these works but throughout his entire opus, Slobodan Knežević provides a model that promotes the feeling and idea of a meditative serenity and silence; it upholds an art that persuades the onlooker to find within himself that same meditative tranquillity, rationalist harmony and balance, so badly needed to meet the challenges of the world in which we live.

By Sava Stepanov