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The works of Robert Dandarov, Macedonian by birth, arise from a painting experience which in western civilization has a long tradition. His realism, leaning on the classical solid mastering of the drawing, traverses into the realms of the visionary confronting numerous artistic aspects: from the ancient Greek and Roman perceptual worlds, through Renaissance curiosity and post-Renaissance beauty, and on the edges of his painted world he touches on the modern and post-modern leftovers, which are still floating upon the ocean of the 21st century. But, the moment when he departs the field of modernism and the post-modernism, is the exact moment, which at first glance feels like a connection with those practices: it is his mild irony and, especially interesting, almost illustrationally salient certain themes, in which at least he is somewhat cynically making fun of the post modernist naïveté in the self-assured “breaking up” of the western traditions, “exiting” from nature and leaving behind all the things which make up the embodiment of the painting experience… Because Dandarov knows, that you cannot transform civilization by letting conceptual simplification of the philosophical and artistically conceptual landscape.

The visionary apparitions coupled with the arsenal of objects and human forms enter his painted space in a way which allows us to see the present moment like a short moment in the long period of intelligent ideas and paintings which formed our civilization. Even if that moment is painted, almost as caricature, it is possible to feel in the strokes and the details that old inheritance in which Dandarov was immersed since his childhood. The inheritance which is formed from the contact between eastern and west-European civilizations.

Namely, although from his painting we can not obviously discover direct influence of icons or some other fragments from the Macedonian traditional art, his painted world conjures elements which can bring us afterward to those same connections: painted words remind us that icons without sacred words or names are nonexistent. The faces which gaze upon us from the canvas awaken memories of iconostasis with saints, which stare immobile into the spaces of monasteries, while guarding the most sacred. Some of his paintings give the impression that we are amongst a battle between good and evil. But at first glance the clear division of good and evil in a reading of Robert’s paintings can so much shift and change, that the clear consciousness is forced to admit its helplessness in comprehending the whole: here the tradition (in which the feelings are “channeled” through the established laws of religious dogma, habits or even intuition) has an advantage.

But again, blind religious faith has been tested through many generations and today does not have the same meaning as in the times of schism and iconoclasm. There are glimpses shining at times through his paintings of modernist convictions which Dandarov puts in a context that illustrates the irony of religious fate. This ironic tone can be recognized from figures that are sometimes seen as false, as masks with no souls, while others are felt as primordial and primary. Our fine ability to read facial expressions quickly reveals Robert’s attitude towards the Christian or Malevich’s “Black Cross,” his attitude toward the magic of fear in socialist dictators, as seen in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita. We can also see his attitude toward Lenin’s hammer and sickle and his attitude toward eavesdropping (everyday practice by the police in a socialist society), which is also tested in his intimate, artistic world as well, so we can see eavesdropping of the painter’s canvas… In such eavesdropping of a painting even we, the critics, recognize ourselves: especially when we want to turn into words what is essentially inexpressible, which can never be a theme for a confession but… that same inexpressible in his paintings has in an artistic sense a direct link with our inner beliefs.


These images in Robert’s paintings as visions of beauty, fear, doubts and some inscrutability of the world, have their genesis in the mystic tales from the East with roots reaching back to the times of old Greek-Roman civilization in an almost straight line across eastern Europe (Byzantium). The relationship between the rigidity of an almost inexplicable horror faces off divine beauty and with this contact this relationship “feeds” on our astonishment and sensitivity. In spite of the fact that Byzantium persisted in Greco-Roman civilization far into the late Gothic period and during the Ottoman invasion moved more to the north, once again Robert Dandarov’s remarkable feeling for drawing does not exclusively rely on the region it came from but his painting ability leans to the west of Europe. His female figures are reminiscent as much of Venus as of Vermeer, Caravaggio, his strokes on the skin sometimes are smoothed down as we admire in Ingres, and sometimes dark tones extend across the canvas in a rough relief that resembles Rembrandt and his Old Testament stories, while the quick strokes might be a distant echo of Rubens… Dandarov’s perspective in his many various, well painted scenes reflects above all else his astonishment at all the Masters he carries with him from earlier places and times.


We can not be sure if this is the influence of his incredible personal decision as a 17-year-old boy to leave the socialist, then underdeveloped, country of Yugoslavia and move to the States, or if it is the result of encountering the New World, where everything was so different and modern? But this other visual American world is nowhere to be seen in either an anesthetic or iconographic sense. Therefore it is hard for me to see Dandarov as an American painter… yet on the other hand, due to his completely unbiased transition across various iconographic motifs and because these motifs converge into one common point, the artist’s own artistic and imaginative life, it is also hard for me to see him as a European or Macedonian painter. He seems to remain somewhere in between in the midst of the ocean of man's imagination, a universal thinker, whose universe will never truly become whole, somehow captured in his paintings, but as much as I want to, I have no proof of this…

In one of Robert’s smaller paintings from his Hundred Drawings series, titled “At The End Of The World,” which I have seen in his studio, an indigenous man in a primitive row-boat has come to a big wall in the middle of the sea and floats in front of it…

This scene, which may admittedly remind us of the people from Africa who float in their small boats toward the shores of Europe, shows us a maybe less political but much more intimate story of an individual. This individual, a man from the old world, may have decided to travel the vastness of the ocean for no particular reason besides his curiosity. And far away in the midst of the ocean, uprooted from his environment, he encounters a total inability to enter the world on the other side. This painting suggest an elementary iconographical direction of Dandarov’s vision: his inner world in relation to the world of reality, his art on one side and the contemporary art trends on the other side of the wall… While they may be on the opposite sides of the wall, they both exist in the same ocean of endless possibilities, related through history and depths which impose like destiny our rowing into the future…

And Dandarov, perhaps more than many other contemporary artists, really knows this.