Slobodan Knezevic has been creating hand-crafted cardboards (kARTon) for almost three decades now. This graphic artist started it in the early 1980s when he discovered an authentic way to express his unique personal and artistic sensibility. His works of art corresponded in a completely natural way to the changes on the post-modernist art scene from that period: the status and dignity of an individual work of art was being revived after a decade long domination of conceptualism and non-material art (idea = form). Those early kARTon works by Slobodan Knezevic were structured as multilayers of the stiffened and prudently painted paper molasses. During his working process, Knezevic controlled random occurrences in order to create his consistent, yet vibrant expressive compositions - plastic entities of his cardboards bore a resemblance to synthetic creations with an exciting surface faktura or to distinctive reified and "sensitised" cardboard creations of irregular shapes and unusual formats. In some of his latter works, Knezevic's kARTon works were created as individual formal objects whose effect is extended to the third, spatial dimension ...

Today Slobodan Knezevic defines his Works made out of paper as painterly creations with the patent geometrical characteristics. The artist controls the entire process of making cardboard very carefully - geometrical hints of motifs, which rest upon domination of lines and minimalist geometrical surfaces, are "built into" the concept and the entire structure of every single work. The lines imply the steadiness and precision of a ruler, but they possess a specific kind of implicit, discreet functional expressivity due to the typical features of "drawing" gestures. In addition to that, the author's drawing is defined as an open linear system, as a drawing without its own overall, closed and defined composition. Instead of the artist's former expressive gesture, the plastic and linear structure is well conceptualised, consistent, harmonised and based upon steady rectangle formations in the present creations. Knezevic's works are mostly identified as "compounds" where the lines of single "sheets" are in a direct contact. They continue onto each other. They are assembled into some new meaningful geometrical and linear configurations - expanding and intensifying the idea of sensible order and rationalism.

There is an unambiguous ethic component in such geometrical aestheticism, and in the drawings that are organised rationalistically: in his art creations, Slobodan Knezevic actually aspires to convey his position which is typical for the times of a permanent and transforming crisis; he tries to find and impose a "message" which would convince us that the future course of existence is possible. In this respect, he offers us a system of visual elements with intertwined, slightly expressive and clearly rational character as a "recipe" which is attractive today, i.e. in the times when we are living our uncertain, endangered and alienated destinies.

By Sava Stepanov