Besides subjective religious feelings which are common to everyone if they are moved by love (according to Saint Paul), the second common particularity of all religions is the role of animals, directly, indirectly, and deeply symbolic. Conscious and unconscious symbolism of animals and also identification with them, rules the wide areas of human’s culture and psyche.What would the words, ideas, notions, do without their animal representants in letters, ideograms, pictograms, visual identification, heraldic, astrology, marks, symbols and signs?
What would architecture and applied plastic art turn to, even that pure, quasi non-applicable, plastic art whose clericals, ideologists and mystics, represent the art to be what it is, in itself, shuddering in front of applied, gnostical-alhemical animism.
What would happen?
The spirit would see unclearly, soul would turn into miserable vegetation, world of culture would be jeopardized by white stains. Poverty would eat riches. Internal solitude would stare to external solitude with confusion. Plants would turn into strange asymmetrical existence.
Both good-nature and ominousness, animals meet man in an external world… And They perform similarly at human being’s internal gate of appearance.
Colours and lines learn the roles of the animals, represent their multiplexity and riches, and taking to oneself man’s sense of sight, establish themselves as images.
in Belgrade, march 2000. Darko Ranković