Geographies of Presence: Paintings from Berlin, Herzegovina, and San Francisco

This monograph follows Illumination and Surprise (2024) as a natural deepening rather than a conclusion. It gathers more than one hundred and thirty works created in the span of three exhibitions—Berlin, Trebinje (Herzegovina), and San Francisco—yet the book resists being read as a document of places. What it offers instead is a cartography of presence. The cities appear not as backdrops but as interlocutors. Berlin sharpens form and compresses gesture; Trebinje breathes through memory, stone, and human closeness; San Francisco disperses light across faces and streets, allowing color to carry time rather than describe it. Each place leaves a distinct pressure on the surface of the painting, yet none claims ownership over it. Throughout the book, faces and places mirror one another. A street looks back like a portrait; a face carries the weight of a landscape. Painting here is not an act of depiction but of encounter—an event that happens between the visible and the lived. The works do not explain their subjects; they remain faithful to them. Tradition is present without quotation, modernity without declaration. Line and color obey discipline while remaining open to surprise. What unifies these works is not style but attentiveness: a refusal to rush the image, a willingness to remain with what appears. This monograph is thus less a retrospective and more a testimony—to painting as presence, to geography as relation, and to the quiet truth that beauty reveals itself not through intention, but through staying. An Athonite Elder Vasileios said that a true creator does not make a career for himself as an artist, but through his art ministers to the mystery of the divine mystagogy which is offered “for the life of the world and its salvation.”

Bishop Maxim (Vasiljevic) was elected Bishop of Los Angeles and the Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2006. He graduated from the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, University of Belgrade, in 1993. He completed his Master of Theology at the University of Athens in 1996, and then three years later, in 1999, at the same university, he defended his doctorate in the field of Dogmatics and Patristics. He worked for one year on his post-doctorate in Paris and the Sorbonne in 2003-04, in the field of Byzantine History and Hagiography. During this time, he also delved in the theory and practical application of painting at the French Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. Bishop Maxim is a professor of Patristics and was teaching Christian Anthropology, Byzantine Philosophy, Canon Law, and Dogmatics at various universities and schools. He speaks Greek, French, Russian, and English. He was the editor of “Theology” – Journal of the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, University of Belgrade. He also leads the Diocesan school of iconography and teaches at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Boston. Bishop Maxim’s scholarly books, studies, and articles include essays on Holy Fathers and Saints; he has also written on the hagiographical and iconographical themes.