"(...) man was created to actively participate in the divine spirit" Titus Burckhardt - Alchemy. The art of the Yugoslav painter Branislav Mihajlovic, currently on display in a set of intervened silkscreen prints, is located on the plane of an archetypal depth that, on the margins of his silence and meditation, of his contemplation, takes us to It is the threshold of the unspeakable, of a silence full of evidence, the territory of myth and the Sacred. A precocious artist, he completed his art studies in 1986 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, followed by a Master's degree in painting. Traveling around Europe, he ended up settling in the Netherlands for two years and living in our country since 1992, where he has exhibited individually since 1994. Branislav grew up without any religious training and only worked as a teacher. Quite late he read the Bible in search of the founding references of the history of universal art. What seemed like merely cultural research would, however, leave deeper traces than expected. The biblical word was a carrier not only of meaning, but of light and knowledge, an ancient wisdom that is translated into symbols and symbolic motifs in the set of intervened silkscreens that are presented to us today and that appear from further afield, from other stages of the journey she has been undertaking towards her roots, the roots of Being. The woman has a prominent place in this universe, an image of calm sensuality appealing to complicity of nature that surrounds it in a blanket of light. Between light and shadows, the clear splendor of the body in its semi-veiled nudity that increases its charm, against the backdrop of a play of geometric and organic shapes, spots and colors suddenly lit by the flame central and red. Games of body and painting, of the body of painting. The series of portraits dates back to the "Ikonostasis" of 1995, an attempt to create an iconology of the human, different races, different ages, both sexes, faces without expression and yet inquiring, peering into the limits of a condition precarious and bathed in a golden atmosphere of an icon suspended between two times and two borders that ultimately merge under the alchemical action of gold, transforming the precious design into pure light, almost apparition ; of a disturbing and sparkling beauty Experience of the Sacred as desire and absence, silent appeal. The painter ventured into the portico of an ancient silence in the interiors of convents flooded by a ghostly, otherworldly light, which spills into shadows that persist and keep their mystery. In the series of convents (which is affiliated with the "temple d'ouro - golden time" of 1996) the golden light is evident. the iridescent irradiation of the Sacred, the bond between the human and the divine, like the great atmospheres of light, unreal landscapes, of a more real reality, populated by small symbols that are landmarks in the universe of soul, stones in the light (the stone, a recurring image, can symbolize the soul), books of ancestral wisdom, receptacles of treasures of the spirit, marks and landmarks on the map of an interior geography. The artist gives continuity to the structuring themes and obsessions of this universe that are gaining meaning organized by a hidden logic. Rails, stones evoke the journey and its archetype, the biblical exodus that gave the title to a 2000 painting. A journey whose promised land seems to be the homeland of a spirit that desires initial light, lost totality of a relationship with the divine and with a nature returned to its splendor. Drained atmospheres, luminous oceans of soft colors, liquid intimate immensity, diaphanous flashes of a palpitating heat of roses and perfumes, rain of morning lilacs, build with unprecedented austerity and beauty a new, sober and There is an image for the Sacred in our days, such as the one that suggests the table with bread and wine, evoking the Last Supper and the Communion that comes with it. associated. Images of a greater spirituality, of a void full of echoes of the music of angels, flowers, the sea and blue fountains, spirituality and sensoriality in happy, balmy weddings. A virtuality of creative gestures in new rituals of light and love. Love without a specific recipient, other than all of humanity, love that was born from absence and impossible loneliness, that wandered in ruins, on docks nowhere, in silent and cold cities It is like the Winter of the soul and that perhaps in the heat of a new sea, a new home, a new warm landscape, ours, very Portuguese, solar and aurafic, like a new book of God, recovering the original ;own and unknown lost heritage, opened up in smiles of warm light, in marine glades of paradise in the sublime art of Branislav Mihajlovic.