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.”