wostok
"Podzemne vode"
(Underground waters)
Author: Wostok
Publisher: SKC Novi Sad
Language: Serbian
Year: 2007
"Wostok's comics are images of dreams, nightmares, delirium that come alone like a curse or are invoked in the fantasy of reality. They are the triumph of black-and-white contrast that has never been so pronounced in favor of the darkness; the triumph of the contours of the skull, the forerunners, the energy of the static images, the richness of the two-dimensional space which, before our eyes, puts us in a scary and frightening perceptible depth. These are not pictures of life, but images that show what begins where life ends." - Uroš Smiljanić
"In the "Underwater Waters" his drawing "shone" in full glory: the black surfaces are really black, just as the white spaces are really white, the lines are precise, with no ghosts. It is now easier to see that Wostok does not use comic strips at all, the lines of motion that need to glimpse the movement and thus dynamise the drawing. He, on the other hand, insists on the frozen scenes and the curious effect, which is to say the complete absence of the noble and the half-hearted. Thanks to this, Wostok's strips resemble the squares of an old nitrite film, moment before, momentarily exposed but certainly visually very seductive. In this album, the collected segments (created during the 1990s) also reveal two Wostok's drawing maneuvers: one desirable to accumulate lines and others trying to purify and subtract the characters and objects into the basic contours. The saturated drawing was used in comic strips based on literary patterns of older writers (with the exception of Rista Vrteva), and the purified mania was drawn to the episode "The Longest Day" (of course, this is the longest in the album). It was produced by Nabora Devolca's regular Wostok's comic strip artist jobs (but also in movies and performance-plays). Both graphics have their own advantages that the author uses a lot to gain an impression (even if, apart from each other, there are different styles) that the comics could only be drawn and no different. This reliability is certainly a confirmation of the author's sovereignty over art." - Ilija Bakić