Vladimir Velickovic was born on August 11th 1935.in Belgrade.
He graduated architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade.
He worked as the associate at the Craftsman studio of Krsto Hegedusic in Zagreb in1962 and 1963.
He was professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, from 1983 till 2000. ( The National Superior School of Fine Arts)
He had been exhibiting since 1951.
Since the 1966.he lived and worked in Paris.
He is the member of Serbian Academy for Science and Arts since 1984.
He received the highest French recognition for culture and arts, Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. (Highest Commander of the Order of Arts and Literature).

In a philosophical sense, as well as when it is spoken about new continents, discoveries represent promises and invitations for journeys across some distant, unexplored geographic spaces. The twentieth century recorded a lot of false good news, professed theoretical epiphanies, and hypothetical conceptual revolutions, worth only to fulfill sheets of paper, and please the narcissism of those who pathetically tried to seek, but have been unable to find. In the history of ideas, underneath two or three real lights, how much darkness was added to the night, darkness that made the blood of ink thicker and made the gloom of the world even blacker?
Dust thrown into the eyes, vanity and deceptions, mainly.

Forget the fog sellers, forget those who make confusions even bigger, disregard riddle-makers, and out of three or four conceptual monuments single out the death instinct, discovered by Freud-discovered, in the same sense that it can be said for someone who found the prehistory cave that he had discovered it. Since this conceptual discovery, measured by basic but efficient theoretical categories, reduces the centuries of past and future negativities down to simplicity of a calm, smooth and hopelessly understandable rationality. From Paleolithic violence to nuclear apocalypses, through ancestral slaughters and eternal wars, individual aggressions and numberless hangings, the death instinct leads and triumphs more spectacularly than the instinct of life, which is its other side.

In 1920, in his work "At the other side of the pleasure principle" Freud tells us oddity of that ever present force in act, in reality, in a shoes of an individual person, in allies of nations, amongst persons who go along well and then despise each other, between countries that discover each other and then hate each other. The force of death: invitation to destroy, to crash, to break, to severe, to annul; the instinct of death, leading towards tearing to pieces, breaking, wounding, hitting, raping; the death instinct, force responsible for murders, and for raising a hand to kill, and finally the same death instinct, force that disturbs the soul, the body and the mind of those who feel the urge to change the live beings into nothingness, to turn the vivid vitality into a rotting corps.

In order to underrate and disdain the influence of his discoveries, Freud was reproached for lack of evidence, absence of clear and real demonstration! As if the reality wasn't enough to prove his statements...

The art history itself shows to what extension sex, blood and death feed and quench their thirst. How many pictures of war scenes, crucifixions, murders, violence, crimes, suicides, spilt blood, gallows, tortures, decapitations, are hanging on the walls of museums! From the Walls of Lasco to the classical images of battles, the death instinct shines across the history of the fine arts as the lightening on the summer night leaves the ephemeral and bright traces upon the starry sky.

It seems that Vladimir Velickovic set an assignment upon himself to paint the very essence of the death instinct. From the very beginning, that is, from his first works, his only concern was to express and record the nature, shape, force and effects of that evil libido.

There is not one drawing, not a single painting nor sketch, no projects of his that are far from desire to clearly present that urge, to materialize it, like entomologists, stinging the thoraces of the dead insect and fastening it on the cork, in order to precisely explore it and measure its monstrosity. Ink, paint, paper, cardboard, brushes, pens, adhesive tape, montage of photographs, it all serves to one single point: how to express that dark energy, how to seize it, to capture it and show it as the beast that artist reduces to the stillness of an exciting image.

Artist's world at no point goes beyond the borders of this project: to stigmatize the permanency of apocalypse, to show reality, every reality, under the sign of tragic, contaminated by negativity, in a constant moving that is, like a force, seeking, undermining, digging, burrowing, and acting towards the foretold Destruction.

No matter weather the ontological catastrophes, metaphysical troubles, ethical cataclysms or theological disasters are in question, Vladimir Velickovic stages the tragic: etymology reminds us of the necessity of making a sacrifice that calms down the forces of evil, asked not to rage, but to restrain themselves. His art offers an equivalent of a Greek redeemed victim of the Homer's Époque; in his art, blood convokes gods, although the artist knows they do not exist...

Michael Onfre

Passage from the text : "Only Skeletons Resist Death", from the catalogue of works of Vladimir Velickovic