Being familiar with the paintingof Ljubomir Perčinlić and in particular that segment of it,being one decade old, the significance of which is sensibilityand bodylessness of line, half-transparency and ethereal qualityof colour as well as fragility of network and screen, in whichthe human vibration of the author's hand reflects itself as anearthquake in the structure similar to an imagery of "thebrain's storm" on an encephallogram, the Perčinlić'ssculpture, observed through such a "network ofremembrances" distinguishes itself to be rather robust,rough and even wild. However, that the first distinction is nothe final one, and even not the first-rate one, the relatingauthor's characteristic of the explicit reverence to thesubstance is convincing us hereby. How much he respects in hispainting the delicious appearance and vanishing of the line,measured and reduced chromatic relations, so much he revenesparticularly in his iron sculptures the superior condition of theweight, by means of which they press down upon the base. Inaddition to this, such a "stabile possibility" isintensified by the construction constant of the laid down somehow"landed rectangular parallelepiped" from whichirregular, strong sprouts rise fort. In its foundation the heavy,stable Perčinlić' sculpture possesses a decisiveness ofoccupying the space and the duration in it, whereby from thecompact mass of its compressed, rectangular parallelepipedshape's condensed energy the sprouts of a clear and expressivepower sprout forth with the architectural tendency of a"Being tending to set up vertically".

More stimulating than trying todecipher whether the attributives of the "manlikecorporality" are in question, is the author's simultaneousdealing with an dim edge zone between the irregularly geometrizedand geometrically organic, that is, his beloved mental habis tobring by stable provoking the confinium of the opposite pairs(such as geometrical and organic, part and whole, stable andunstable) to a point of the doubt their boundaries and theirblendings. But, this is actually a procedure of doubled codingwith a possibility of reading-out in different directions. If werecall the amazing effects of water-colour vibrations inPerčinlić's painter's nets, actually produced by anintervention with a sharp graphite point or even a scalpel, itdoes not mean that his sculpture owes anything to his painting,but that paradoxical contrariety in the nature of procedure ispresent and identical when on his browned iron sculptures appearthe effect of a smoothly tightened skin, but also when in thecuts of edges a fine cinnamon-like corrosion powder is provoked.

If it conveys the properties of arobust weight, Perčinlić's sculpture simultaneously shows alsothe versatile transformations of epidermis within the range fromsmooth monoliths and highly polished elaborated superficies, overcutting-out insertions and multi-part sheet iron joints in someworks, and all the way to their porpous corrosiveness anddilapidation, dematerialization of tissue into powder, i.e. acertain entrophy.

The author's harmoniousbuilding-up in various media warrants primarily a comprehensiveunfying general attitude, a consistent view of the world,repeatedly reminded of by his oil-paintings of the 60's withlandscapes composed like a puzzle. The essential components ofthese landscapes with chromatically distinguished"cultivated fields" cut-in into the landscape showamazing similarities with the profiles of Perčinlić'ssculptures. In a contrary imagined act of cutting-out such"cultivated fragments" from the author's landscapes,there appear an elementary form of his sculpture. There is nodoubt that in Perčinlić's system of plastic thinking there hasbeen laid balanced and unifying principle which simply representshis "model of the world" as a multi-layered as much asalso a multi-directionally functioning whole, which is bestproved by an easiness of transferability of this model from thesphere of painting into that of sculpturing, and in the oppositedirection.

Spomenka Nikitović

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Ljubomir Percinlic
Born 1939 in Zenica. Graduated from The Academyof Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1996 in the class of NedeljkoGvozdenovic. He is a full-time professor at the Academy of FineArts in Sarajevo. He is a member of the Croatian Association ofthe Visual Artists. Lives and works in Zagreb.