Probably the first thing that strikes a newcomer to Mersad Berber’s work is his astonishing skill as a draughtsman. Berber draws with a fluency and confidence that has almost entirely disappeared from art in Western Europe and the United States. His forms have a fullness and solidity few artists can manage now.

The next thing that might strike such a newcomer is the artist’s control of texture. His surfaces are various, but they are always alive. Perhaps one reason for this feeling for texture is that his mother was a well-known weaver, and he was therefore brought up with the boundaries of an established craft tradition.

The third thing that might impress a novice – after he or she had absorbed the impact of Berber’s technical skills – is the typical fragmentation of much of his imagery. His paintings have sometimes been described as a polyphonic,» with one image or scene apparently sliding into another. He has a habit of producing works that are in effect polytypchs, with a number of different scenes on the same canvas. He also often leaves a scene unfinished in some way, or else makes it look as if it has already suffered the attacks of time. Some paintings look like the wounded works that lurk in museum storerooms, awaiting a restorer’s attention.

These characteristics are, of course, fairly typical of art in the Post Modern epoch. So too is the impulse towards classicism – many of Berber’s paintings and drawings, though not all, feature classical figures or depict episodes from Greek and Roman legend. In this sense he is typical of an increasingly prominent tendency in contemporary art, where the return to certain features of 19th century academic painting has become an emblem of revolt against an avant-garde which has itself become established and academic. The pioneer of this tendency was the Italian artist Giorgio de Chiricio, and since de Chiricio’s death at the end of the 1970s, it has manifested itself both in Italy, with so-called «pittura colta» («cultivated painting»), and also more recently in Russia, with the work of the artist of the Novia Akademia («New Academy») in St. Petersburg.

The real secret of Berber’s art, however, seems to me to be linked to his own origins. Born in Bosnia, he has lived and worked in Sarajevo, and later in Zagreb, with another studio near Dubrovnik. That is, he and his art straddle one of the most important cultural fault-lines in Europe, a place of frequent upheavals, both political and artistic. His work shows influences from the Renaissance and Baroque.masters of Italy – the Dalmation coastline was for a long period under the domination of Venice – but also others from Byzantine painting and from the art of the Ottoman Empire, especially its miniature painting. The fragmentation visible in his work seems to mime the effects of centuries of cultural conflict. It is a historical drama enacted on the surface of the canvas.

Artists who work do not work in the established centers for western art – Paris, New York, Rome and Milan, Cologne and Berlin, London – often complain that they feel marginalised by their situation. Berber is one of the few – the celebrated Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum is perhaps another – who have succeeded in turning this situation to advantage. One can see in Berber’s work how the various influences I have cited flow into it, and are then transformed by his very precise sense of who he is, and of how he ftts into a context which is unique to himself.

His long roster of exhibitions, demonstrates the extent to which he has been able to
communicate his unique sensibility to an international audience.

Edward Lucie Smiths