#People
The artistic world of Nenad Petrović
text written by Prof. dr Radosav Pušić
In touch with the artistic world of Nenad Petrović, the founder of the “MANEDA line” collection within his company Sinerco doo, (educated in Serbia and France, lived in Belgrade, Paris and Moscow), we are overwhelmed by the impression that it was shaped by decades of journeying through a wide range of skills and deep contemplation of the meaning and significance of the materials that constitute both nature and human beings. Beauty – and it will turn out that this is not only the beauty of stone, wood, metal and glass – is a shocking testament to the connection between the individual and nature, the individual and cosmos, the individual and other individuals. All questions, answers, solutions and dilemmas remain inscribed in the art and art objects of Nenad Petrović. The facts that he has realized projects for the famous French design house “Lalique”, the municipality of Paris, châteaux of the Loire Valley, the royal family of Saudi Arabia, a residence of the President of Russia, luxury cruise ships, etc., and that he has mastered a unique method of processing natural stone and carefully shaped stainless steel, wrought iron, brass, wood and tempered glass pieces, speak of his exceptional talent. Looking back on his entire opus until the moment he turned to tables, we can see that from the very beginning he transposed the world of matter as perceived by our senses into obscure patterns of energy. It is as if the old concepts of time and space lost their meaning in this play with artistic forms so natural to the eye. In his art, he reveals the relativity of the micro- and macrocosm by reducing it to the dimensional plane, capturing all the possibilities of a moment in the “movement” of shaped material which explores a moment of time in a small portion of space. An artistic creation always offers a point of view, a relative difference between the position of the object and the beholder. Tables, as a separate story, are what “sacred spaces” used to be in the past – places of gathering and congregation, meeting places where the ordinary appears extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes ordinary.
Artistic skill, and connoisseurs would say even more than that, shows that in nature only those systems are possible which are founded on the best symmetry, proportion and harmony, and all of them originate, in one way or another, from the “golden ratio”. And since the golden ratio reflects the “divine geometry” of the Universe itself, it is a true adventure to search for it in the art objects created by Nenad Petrović.
Tables, this embodied art form, are actually beauty itself. They captivate us with their deep, simple and all-pervading mystery, simultaneously bringing disquiet and filling us with peace, opening us for a wonderful feeling that we too are an inseparable part of the Mystery. This is the nature of the art world of Nenad Petrović.
