Need or desire? Perhaps both.
Or when the need is a desire and desire a need.
Not to do anything is perhaps the only state when desire and need cancel each other, disappear in an eyelash stroke when eyes are closed.
Sound of sombreness and endless void of darkness makes desire meaningless.

My eyes are witnesses that never testify.
My eyes remember silently.
My eyes have realms where everything they saw they drop into the space of oblivion.

Only whiteness has the role of awakening what is forgotten.
Everything that appears I recognize and without words I name.
By putting colour onto whiteness. Silently offering an unintrusive existence.
Whiteness disappears through coming into being of a world that others might name otherwise.

My signs and symbols in one moment are no longer only mine.
Their existence will depend on others. The moment of their separation from me gives rise to joy in me.

In my eyes, there is no place for desire, because desire conceals the essence.
That's what my eyes know.
Knowing that they know not.

All of my states are states of need.
All of my actions are actions caused by need.
Only the essence has no need to exist.

Is hope the same as desire?
Can hope be my overcoming, a step towards desire?
Wherefrom a hope in me?

I cannot say I didn't hope. I did. I still do.

I was hoping for convalescence even when I didn't know what convalescence was.

I was hoping for every new morning.
For every new day.
For every night, where darkness is like a huge mirror in which my mind was reflected, realizing that in hope the beginning and the end are one and the same.
Depending on the point of view.

I was hoping for friends, and if from time to time I've made some new friends and some old I've lost, I have noticed how indifference descends on my shoulders like dust that is hard to remove.

Hope is an invisible ember that smolders within us, not accelerating our heartbeats, for accelerated heartbeats create a flame that carries a desire on its flares.

Desire is a light of senses.
Hope is an ascent after the fall.

Painting is a need created by man.
The only thing I knew about painting from the very beginning of my engagement with it was that it was going to be a long road.
This length implies everything.
And nothing.
The only thing important is a journey.
Successful or unsuccessful outcomes of the work are only stations along this way.
Sorrow and joy enter and exit through the same door, bringing with themselves their markings, like seasons of the year.

Art is a synonym for the word painting.
The painter became an artist.
It is like some aristocratic appellation for painters, behind which the entire ordinariness of this craftsmanship is hidden.
The word art is a burden on the painter's fingertips.
It is a mist in which the voracity and vulgarity of ambition are safely disguised into a pleasant appearance.

With a lot of effort, the art of painting withstands all challenges of new media.
Today, it is on its deathbed.
The painting, which lives through the so-called state of 'sickness unto death' (with skillful make-up done by critics, museum curators and gallery owners) is declared healthy by the galleries and museums themselves, or at least there is an attempt to do so.
Old craftsmanship breathes its last breath. This skill has survived only at some training courses for amateurs, where one becomes a hastily trained painter, for in more serious art schools new media are more attractive for students.

After the course, those enrolled in it secretly dream about Van Gogh in the shape of the rainbow.

Traditional art of painting is transformed into an imitation.
The idea became a content of the painting.
The technique of conducting these ideas is not of importance.
It can be taken up from anyone.
If we devaluate the process of carrying out the idea it resembles the Saturn who devours his children.

Postmodernism is a euphemistic notion of the powerlessness of painting and art in general.
Expressionistic expression without emotion is a formula of postmodernism.
The idea is what holds emotion under control, not in order to direct it towards a proper place, but because of its own narcissism. The futile gesture of a paintbrush is a demand of an idea, and not a requirement of an emotion.
Emotion annihilates the aesthetics, giving life to new forms we didn't hope for.
A moment in which something unknown leads our hand, a moment beyond knowledge and ignorance, (and this 'unknown' is neither God nor some supernatural power), this is a moment when our hand is guided by imagination and a world of visions.

There will be no new narratives, because none of the problems that man himself created is solved yet.
The form of those eternal narratives shall change, or shall be formed depending on fashion, but the authenticity of artistic painting, under the condition that it satisfies all prerequisites, in terms of form and content, shall depend on the level of honesty of the painter.

Tafil Musovic
Amsterdam, 2004