Even Ohio is on Scedule

by Uros Komlenovic

Many of them were fighting the war, many of them were sacrificing, someone was complaining and resisting: the painter Ratomir Gligorijevic put his civic resistance to this madness on canvas

Friends of Belgrade painter Ratomir Gligorijevic often wonder how he can sleep among all the vampires and monsters when they visit his home overlooking the Morava river. When they say monsters they mean his paintings with all kinds of monsters grinning on burnt out mosques, destroyed towns, rivers of refugees, raped women and piles of human bones.

The horror is supplemented with the images of Slobodan Milosevic as both a red angel and a white angel of peace, Serb intellectuals attacking the opposition with Communist symbols, General Mladic and his staff on a bed of skull trophies, Church elders dancing with UN blue helmets looking on, Owen and Stoltenberg as clowns.

"I most often relied on articles and pictures in Vreme for these paintings," Gligorijevic told VREME. "That was where I found the information I needed."

Gligorijevic (77) was a partisan fighter during the last world war but he left the Communist party right after the war over mass killings of ideological enemies. He has also painted frescos and mosaics in large formats.

"I watched Stefan Grubac on TV. I got so angry and I painted a picture. That is how it started, anger over everything that is happening and being powerless to stop it. I admit this is therapy, getting out negative energy. I feel better when I finish my paintings."

He decided to make a chronicle of the war.

"I decided to do oil paintings in gallery format. I gave up abstraction because I wanted my pictures to be clear to so-called ordinary people. I wanted everyone to remember these paintings. You can forget the written word but not pictures so I decided to leave a testimony to these times of evil and stupidity as a warning that this has to stop and never come back."

He has painted 30 large and some 15 smaller pictures for that chronicle. He said each picture would have an accompanying poem or other words for exhibition. He has already drawn attention.

"Their (Serbian state TV) camera crew were in the village and they heard about me. They came to my house took their equipment out and told me they were from the TV and that I was a lonely painter and that they would film me. I told them I was not so lonely. They filmed some old paintings and then they saw a picture of Biljana Plavsic as a hawk flying over six million Serb bones. They finally called it a day when I showed them "Raped Moslem Women". The report was never shown."

Except for one painting called "Requiem for Yugoslavia" which portrays Milosevic, Tudjman and the other former Yugoslav republican presidents, Gligorijevic does not paint political and military leaders from other nations.

"I started doing this to show Serbs what we are doing. I am not interested in Moslems and Croats. They probably have honorable people to deal with criminals. My ancestors fought for the freedom of this country. I contributed and I have a right to warn people. Nationalist, chauvinists, Seselj and others are either mad or are consciously destroying Serbia and the Serbs."