WHAT WAS CUT IN PARACIN

GranitArt begins in 1943, in Paracin, Serbia. That year Ljubivoje Todorovic, remembered in the family as deda Ljuba, opened a stone house under his own name: Granites Ljubivoje Todorovic. GranitArt Studio, the fourth generation of that line, registered in London as GranitArt Studio Ltd, descends from his bench.

This tabula records what is known of the line and what changed along it: the stone, the tools, the hand, and finally the reason the fourth generation stopped repeating the trade and began a different work.

The first stone was white

In 1943 granite was not yet imported into the country. A stone house worked with what its own ground gave it, and the first works of the house were cut in Vencac marble: the white marble quarried on Mount Vencac near Arandjelovac since 1881, the same stone that faces the Church of St. George at Oplenac. Soon after came the grey granite of Bukovik, a domestic granite the pioneers of the trade adopted quickly.

Everything was done by hand. The stone was split and shaped with chisel, hammer and point, and polished by hand with abrasive stone, pass after pass, until the surface closed. There was no machine between the cutter and the block. What a work weighed, the hand carried; what it showed, the hand had made.

Ljubivoje settled the house in Paracin and stood among the first in the trade there. He left no manifesto. He left a method, and a name his line would carry.

Milorad and the machine

The second generation changed the scale. Milorad Todorovic, active in the house from 1954 to 2011, took it from the hand to the machine while most of the trade around him still worked the old way. Cutting saws and polishers arrived, and the work moved from rough hand finishing to fine machine-cut surfaces, polished to a mirror.

The machine opened the door to a harder stone. From the late 1960s the first imported dark granites reached Yugoslavia, and in the 1970s they reached private stone houses. The first among them was South African Impala, quarried near Rustenburg, a stone geologists call gabbro and the trade calls granite. Its grain was even and its supply steady, every block as dark as the last, which made it the ideal stone for the European market.

In the 1980s the opening became a wave. Alongside Impala came the stones that defined the decade:

• Africa Red, from South Africa, red and black, the stone of hotel lobbies and banks;
• Balmoral Red, from Finland;
• Nero Zimbabwe, almost black, for those who wanted darker than Impala;
• Paradiso, from India, veined in violet, grey and rose;
• Labrador, from Norway, blue and green, whose crystals flash under light.

Blocks travelled through Italy, where the yards of Carrara and Verona cut and traded stone from every continent, and through the Adriatic ports. They were paid in foreign currency, which Yugoslavia rationed strictly. A house that worked only domestic marble or sandstone could not buy them. A house that secured steady channels, and owned machines able to cut and polish so hard a stone, took the market of the whole region.

Under Milorad, the house in Paracin was such a house: among the first with the capital to import, and with the technology to bring imported granite to a mirror. In his years it grew into one of the leading stone houses of Yugoslavia.

The fourth generation did not repeat the trade

A lineage is not a trade. The fourth generation, Noa Todorovic, did not continue the work the way it had been done. He founded a separate house, GranitArt Studio, registered in London as GranitArt Studio Ltd, and gave it a different law.

The idea came over a game of chess. Playing, he saw a board of granite, and with it the first work of the studio: Lancelot’s Gambit, a chessboard in granite that is still being made. In that board he did not see a stone that stands still. He saw what granite is: frozen magma, a stone of life, beauty and strength. The studio exists to return that respect to it.

I did not see a stone that stands still. I saw frozen magma.

Noa Todorovic, Meister Architect

The mosaic began as a gift. The first Tessellated DNA was a framed mosaic made for one person, and it still hangs in her room. In making it he found the value of irregularity: a cut that is never repeated, gold set against granite, precious stone and copper where the stone asks for them. From that prototype grew Tessellated DNA, the lithic mosaic of the studio, in which every intervention is authentic and every work is one of one. It can be set in any room in the world, because it is made to last as long as the granite it is cut from.

The record

• Founded: 1943, Paracin, Serbia, as Granites Ljubivoje Todorovic.
• Founder: Ljubivoje Todorovic, known in the family as deda Ljuba.
• First stone: white Vencac marble, then the grey granite of Bukovik.
• First tools: chisel, hammer and point; polishing by hand with abrasive stone.
• Second generation: Milorad Todorovic, 1954 to 2011; machine cutting, imported granite, mirror polish.
• Fourth generation: Noa Todorovic, Meister Architect, founder of GranitArt Studio Ltd, London.
• The work today: Tessellated DNA lithic mosaics and monolithic granite, by commission only through granitart.studio. No memorials and no cemetery work.