Dejan Slepcevic was born in 1958 in Belgrade, where he graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts, department of painting and prints. He is a member of the Serbian Fine Artists Association, very active and has exhibitions both in Serbia and abroad. Slepcevic is known as a very productive artist and his interests for motifs in painting are broad, ranging from landscape, still nature and flowers, the female figure and nude, to compositions with horses.
He is well-known for his paintings of Belgrade, the city that is his perpetual inspiration, to which he always comes back. The Belgrade motifs are painted with the special virtuosity of a master who uses the spatula to accentuate both the detail and the whole of the image to life. The paint layers on the canvas are thicker and the spatula makes them dynamic and sharp, which could not be done with a simple brush. The colours are intense but balanced in the composition and his paintings are always recognized for their signature style and colours.
Slepcevic uses a similar technique to paint still nature and flowers. The vases with brightly coloured roses and rich layers of paste have become the painter’s symbol regarding that particular motif. The flower petals are so fully coated in layers of paint that they can be felt with a finger.
Dejan’s paintings of racing horses are particularly dynamic. They are surrounded by a cloud of dust from the track and the horses are only partially seen or insinuated in the mist. The figures of animals are strained while they gallop with the jockeys hardly remaining in the saddle, forming a unity with the horses in their desire for victory. Everything is in motion, it looks as if they will run past the limits of the painting any second, making the painting appear too small for such struggle.
In his series of female figures and nudes, Dejan is far more subtle and the colours are less intense. He paints very tender figures of girls with pronounced and characteristic shapes. Those characters seem “caught” in the artist’s surroundings while they sit, walk or rest… He paints them carefully using pastel tones of brown, ochre and similar colours. What binds them all together is a romantic, fairy-like atmosphere surrounding them. Loneliness and languor is painted on their faces, immersed in a world of their own, far from reality.
In the end, we have to wait and see what other surprises Dejan has for us, from his great repertoire of ideas and new motifs.
