Flesh at the Threshold – Veličković Through a Jungian Lens
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
Vladimir Veličković (1935-2019) is a Serbian-French painter whose oeuvre is characterized by fragmented bodies, suspended violence, and stark palettes of black, grey, white, and red. In his work, one encounters an intense horizon for a Jungian-informed hermeneutic of the uncanny, the archetypal shadow, and the zeitgeist of post-war Europe and beyond.
Veličković’s pictorial world demands nothing less than an investigation of how trauma, collective memory, and mythic energies converge in “the figure in agony,” thus making his oeuvre a rich locus for an uncanny Jungian contemporary reading.
In order to interpret Veličković’s work through a Jungian lens, several key concepts merit articulation. Firstly, archetypes are innate, universal dispositions or psychic potentials, residing in the collective unconscious and manifesting in symbols, myths, and artistic forms. Jung’s shadow denotes the repressed, hidden, or denied parts of the psyche, individually and collectively. Confrontation with the shadow is central to individuation but also carries the risk of projection, descent, or integration. Next, the uncanny (das Unheimliche), in a Jungian reading, may be considered the moment where the familiar returns as strange, the psyche’s contents rendered visible, destabilising subject/object separation. In art, this may manifest as the figure becoming “Other,” or the body turned into threshold. We should also name katabasis, Nekiya, and the alchemical nigredo, or in other words, a descent into darkness and confrontation with the shadow, leading (potentially) to transformation. This becomes a metaphor for individual and collective psychic systems.
Veličković’s bodies, human, animal, and hybrid, are often depicted in suspension, explosion, falling, torn, and suspended between life and death. One catalogue notes that his line “seems signed by a scalpel, vibrant, bloody, and astonishing.” From a Jungian perspective, these bodies may be read as somatic manifestations of the shadow archetype, the denied and projected violence of the culture and era made visible in flesh. The corporeal fragmentation echoes the psychic fragmentation of the modern subject, the persona ruptured, the ego confronted by primordial instinctual depths.
The palette of black, grey, white, and red further suggests a liminal zone, life/death, flesh/blood, machine/animal, human/inhuman. Scholars note Veličković’s fascination with the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the freeze-motion of bodies in transit, emphasising “movement arrested, motion as shock” in his triptychs. Thus, his figural chaos is not decorative, it is a symbolic container for collective trauma and instinctual force. The uncanny arises because the body, the locus of identity and subjectivity, is rendered “Other,” destabilised. We recognise ourselves in the figure, yet we recoil. The painting becomes a mirror of what the psyche cannot integrate.
One of Veličković’s signature motifs is the hybrid figure, human and animal, machine and body, that stands or falls in indeterminate voids. The boundaries of species, flesh, and subject/object disintegrate. His drawing line is razor sharp, and his figures seem to float in a no-space, timeless but traumatic. In Jungian terms, this is the terrain of the nigredo, the descent into blackness, chaos, and disintegration, all prerequisite (in alchemical metaphor) for rebirth. The painting holds the viewer in that suspended moment of collapse before transformation. The uncanny resides in the fact that we recognise human flesh, movement, and action, yet they have been decoupled from meaning, context, and home. The body thus becomes threshold, between life and death, between wake and dream, between subject and object. It is where the archetypal and the historical fuse. For the viewer, the confrontation is not simply aesthetic but psychic, the figure becomes the repressed, the violently denied, to which we are invited to respond.
If Veličković’s oeuvre is firmly rooted in mid-to-late 20th-century Europe, its resonance extends into our present cultural condition, the digital, disembodied, machinic era. His torn bodies, animal/human hybrids, and violent stasis can be read as prefiguring the post-human uncanny, avatar corpses, drone illness, algorithmic violence.
From a Jungian-zeitgeist perspective, the archaic body of myth (tormented Dionysian flesh, crucified Christ, sacrificed animal) morphs into a ghost-body rendered in data, circuit, and image loop. The shadow is no longer repressed in the personal unconscious alone but dispersed in network, media, and simulation. In this sense, Veličković’s work may be seen as prophetic, a mythic organ for the digital trauma of modern humanity. Veličković invites us to dwell in that threshold, to witness the figures, to feel their horror as our own, then perhaps to turn and ask, "What elements of collective shadow have we refused?" What forms of splitting still animate our cultural bodies? What painting would the digital ghost-body produce?
The task of the viewing subject becomes symbolic work, to recognise the repressed, the flayed, the hybrid, and thereby to open a space for integration. Again, in Jungian terms, it is not comfort but confrontation, uncanny, archetypal, and therefore necessary.
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslavian roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
References:
Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 1). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)
Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and religion: West and East (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 11). Princeton University Press. (Original works published 1938–1954)
iResearchNet. (n.d.). Art as a reflection of the collective unconscious (Transpersonal psychology).
Galerie Claude Lemand. (n.d.). Vladimir Veličković [Artist biography].
Artmajeur Magazine. (n.d.). Vladimir Veličković: A master of expressing human suffering
