From the program “Obzori”, OTV 2010
Igor Zidić, director of the Modern Art Gallery in Zagreb,
opened the exhibition by Hari Ivančić entitled “Lands”
The exhibition entitled “The Earth’s Crust, the Earth’s Skin”
opened the 56th Split Summer Festival, KA5 TV 2010.
Interview with the academy artist Hari Ivančić
KA5 TV 2010.
The double and or multiple layers of Hari Ivančić’s paintings are something absolutely new in both Croatian and world terms, at least as far as the author of these lines is aware. For almost a year and a half, according to the artist, his oil paints kept separating and falling off the canvas, as it was completely saturated with material, and he would gather them up from the floor, time and time again, and return them to the vertical surface. This, actually annoying and frustrating situation, led Ivančić to paint on several layers of canvas (two to three), which he applies one on top of the other.
The closest historical example of a similar innovative practice was the work of the Argentine-Italian artist, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) and his spatialism, which consists of monotone, mono-chromic pictures, perforated or cut with sharp objects. Fontana, by destroying his picture, showed us that alongside what is “in front” (the representation) there is also something “behind”, that is the picture as an object has three and not only two dimensions. His revolution functions on the level of the concept, and does not move far from that idea, although we can talk of the aesthetic dimension of the materialization of the idea.
In contract to this, Ivančić has not abandoned painting, but, on the contrary, he is multiplying it; he first paints one canvas, on top of which he stretches another (and a third), and again paints on it. After the painting on the second canvas has been defined, he cuts it, slashes it, and so we can see what is underneath through the gash. In other words, we do not know what the entire first canvas looks like, because we are only able to see part of it, whereby the idea of a palimpsest arises – a parchment from which an old text has been erased to make room for a new one. This is an association which takes us along the wrong path however, because the artist does not erase the layers of the picture, nor does he paint over them later, but the painted canvases are layered, as weavers layer carpets, one on top of the other. This is instead a case of the cryptographic organization of information, artistic messages which are hidden from us, which we know about, or at least sense that they exist in the places covered by the painting on top.
What is it that Ivančić paints? Landscapes – like O. Gliha, F. Šimunović or J. Janda, that is, his homeland, Istria (E. Kokot, Q. Bassani, E. Murtić …). It is a bird’s eye view, and the narrow edge of the horizon at the top of the picture ensures we recognize the motif. But this is no longer a figurative landscape, and has not been so for a very long time, which leads to (associative) abstraction, since the surfaces are so shimmery, irritatingly vibrant, optically oscillating, with various chromatic frequencies and valeric blending, that the eye of the observer loses any fixed point, any sure support, leading from the centre to the edges, or anywhere from anywhere. It is all centre and all edge, and we – like the artist before – are drawn into the picture, which is no longer merely an object, but a subject, we do not see only it, but it sees us, as the Slovene artist Bojan Gorenec asserted, back in the 1980’s. It is not Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) but it is not far from it, because as the artist paints the picture, so the picture “paints” (defines, mirrors, paints) the artist.
Naturally, we will recall Pollock and his “dripping” technique, which “drew” him into the picture and made him part of the painted field, but Pollock painted on the floor, with no distance, whilst Ivančić does so on an easel. The difference is in the elevation of 90°, and in both cases the results (on one of many levels) are the same or similar; the surface is a relief, material (like in informal art) exceptionally tactile and haptic, rich in colour. If we recall that Ivančić gathers the oils he uses to paint from the floor, because his surface, saturated with material, is no longer able to receive them, and if we know that he paints with a painting knife, then it will be clear to us that it is a matter of similar but also very different procedures and results.
The artist’s horizontal land, seen from the air (landscape) rises up, literally, and becomes a vertical wall, on whose surface, so rich in shapes and colours, we seem to see signs, letters, words, which are challenged by that vibrating variety. T. Maroević, three years ago, compared Ivančić’s earth’s crust with the earth’s skin, a powerful parable,which also holds water in architecture – a wall, whose crust (plaster) is the skin of the building.,
Istrian fresco paintings (a technique which requires great speed) or the painting by M. Detoni Fantazija oronulug zida (Fantasy of a decrepit wall) (1938) would take us too far, into a homeland or romantic theme, which are below the surface of Ivančić’s artistic habitat.
Therefore it has to be stressed that this is original, native born, innovative art, an artistic process from which new surprises still await us.
From the time he appeared on the art scene in the early nineteen-nineties, right up to the present day, Hari Ivančić has been systematically building his own artistic poetry, presenting it through his choice of subject matter and the specific character of his almost classical artistic idiom. These are his personal and creative constants: Istria as his thematic and motif focus, and the informal construction of the picture.
But what is it that makes him so convincingly special, if the heritage of landscape painting is so rich in names and creations, in the treasury of world heritage? What makes him different from all that heritage, when the brilliant works of Šimunović and Gliha are still unsurpassed? What is the special significance of his work, after Bassani’s landscape analysis of Istria, Budićin’s radical synthesis, Kokot’s powerful tectonics or Diminić’s structural limitation to that same Istria?
Even if it is post academy, from his home in central Istria he has created a recognizable icon, more an allusion in symbols than in essence, from that first appearance, from artistic sensation and thesis, through a decently, honestly and honourably executed analysis of every aspect of the piece, twenty years later, we have before us today an artist of masterful synthesis.
His dialectically crystal clear path, with no surprises, has produced a man and work which as conspirators bring us coherence, which means consistency in the choice of subject and in the choice of artistic materials. Only the stylistic elements of his work have changed, systematically, gradually, carefully, arising from deep inside the artist’s spirit. From the delicate associative-symbolic iconics of the early nineties to today’s artistic synthesis, in which from his mimesis only the monumental dynamic configuration of red, white and grey fields remains, moving rhythmically upwards, to the heavens, like a prayer.
On first sight the reduced palette of colour contains all the complexity of the informal construction. Not just the material, but also the complex colouration. In the creative process of compression of statement and expression, the artist in fact uses a radical but supple reductionist principle. Only a distant association remains in the picture from the “primary” homeland image, in the three colours of the Istrian soil, whilst in the interpretation what is most important are the internal tectonics, which in regular and alternate rhythms synthesize their ode to the beauty of the land. The semantic basis is still visible in the vertically arranged ploughed fields, but there are now interjections, new forms and shapes, in which a new metaphysical meaning may be read. In the cosmic creation, heaven and earth join forces in the dazzling unity of this vision of a new world. A new world in the biblical sense is a world rediscovered. Eased of the burden of the weight of sin, it is transfigured and has rediscovered its own fertility. Hari Ivančić tells us about that abundant fertility. About the Garden of Eden, where everything is ready to blossom and welcome fruit. That is why his garden is exciting, passionate, fragrant and tactile. It is fertile and open to growth. The repetitive waves of the ploughed field are like a hymn, mysterious and full of unknown gifts. But his Eden of Istria has been divested of carefree sweetness. In the physical absence of man it is full of signs of man. It is full of blisters, tectonic, fateful and essential, as the artist presents most strikingly at the exhibition from 2010, in the triad of Red, White and Green Lands, as his personal creative credo.
Precisely because Hari Ivančić is a striking example of an artist who, out-growing his homeland micro-topos, has discovered universal meanings, creating them through his contemporary expression of great suggestiveness. That is what makes him unique.
Starting with a panoramic view of Istrian towns, extracting the crystal of their essence and by synthesis of the pyramidal agglomerations on the tops of hills, the artist Hari Ivančić has been systematically and exclusively painting his experience of his home soil, the earth of Istria, for a decade now. If his sights were set high from the very beginning, looking down from a “bird’s eye view” on selected villages and distant houses, with only a cypress tree here and there in the neighbourhood, to serve as orientation, gradually his gaze became directed towards the landscape, looking at the surface of the earth face to face, and he did away with any form of reference to the setting or the wider air. Ivančić’s paintings very decisively gained an exceptional coherence; all that was shown in them was in the foreground, in a flat projection, without any suggestion of background, distance or depth.
We could perhaps add that, in way of compensation in his compositions the role of pigment became gradually stronger, the relief of layers of paint and the emphasized contrast between the plots of land took on the function of bringing dynamics to the surface. His love for the motif of the land was moved by a sense of the similarity between working an artist’s canvas and turning a fertile field. True, he is not ploughing or digging with either a brush or a spade, but as a analogy the furrows and ridges turn on the canvas as he turns the layers of material, whilst under the sun, the meadows and arable land are given a new appearance and receive the abundant life of changes in light, under the hand of the artistic creator of the composition, who selects elements on the canvas, offering us the organic vitality of harmonized chromatic relationships.
Already in his urban panoramas, Hari Ivančić had a good sense of how a flat surface is not necessarily monotonous or unambiguous. Painting the walls of old houses, he also knew how to interpret their instability and amphibious nature in an appropriate manner. That is to say, behind their current form, there was a hint of the past, the patina pealing off them indicated the logic of “long life” and the factor of the involvement of time. The poetics of the informal evaluated appropriately the tension between what is seen and existence, in fact it gave special place to the ambiguity of worn and decaying reality.
Definitely turning to his mother Gaea, in the form of his native Istria, Hari Ivančić successfully brought together both universal and regional impulses. Choosing meadows and plains, fields and borders also meant respect for surveying, the geodetic basis and geometrical premises of organization of space. Therefore he nurtured the autonomy of the painting using “abstract landscape” structural trends, close to Poliakoff and De Stael (not the geometrically radical, constructively strict lines of Mondrian or Mortensen) – and more locally Gliha and Šimunović. However, since in so doing he continued to insist on his own strong personal fingerprint, the temperament of his work and the affective value of his ductus, supported by his strong use of colour, his art retained the lyrical “Taschist” component, and in a way sums up the experience of modernist pictorial art.
Ivančić’s genius loci was given a seal of cosmic scale, and as a result became recognizable in cosmopolitan, foreign circles as the pars pro toto. The intensity of the juxtaposition of belts of colour, the dynamic weaving of horizontal, vertical and diagonal forces, the power of the layering and friction of the variety of substance, all together formed the artistic persuasion of the artist’s idiom. His endeavours are still moving in the direction of energetic submission of what is seen to the power of personal interpretation and the homogeneity of the emanating of the light from the landscape in focus. Nataša Šegota Lah long ago emphasized the metrics and matrixes, the majesty and mythical nature of Ivančić’s creativity, and for our part, we would add the materiality and monumental nature, the methodical and metamorphosis of the subject.
In his endeavour to further analyse his experience of the landscape and understanding of the work of the artist as an integral process, Hari Ivančić, initially accidently and unintentionally, recently opened up quite a crack in his system, even a literal perforation and cut into the tissue of the picture. That is to say, by slicing the canvas, the lower layer was revealed, or, literally, the backdrop, that is a surface that had already been used, a surface that had been worked on before. Where this artist is concerned, it certainly was not a conceptual breakthrough following on from Fontana’s gestures of cutting textures in order to break through to the “other side”, in the sense of the other side of the artist in general. Where Ivančić’s ripping and cutting the canvas is concerned, it becomes vital curiosity regarding contrast and the fruitful confrontation of two phases, two layers or two entities of the painting. Taking hold of chance, including a certain aleatoric element and surprise, our artist accepted this as an opportunity and a challenge to enrich the balance, to attempt a true deepening of the demanding questions of the life of forms.
In following on many occasions the growth and development of the artistic opus of Hari Ivančić, we have appreciated with good reason the moderation and connection between its changes. We take this present move forward too as an act of evolution rather than a radical twist, because we believe in the justification of his decisions, which do not close the door to the cycles and spirals of maturation on the basis of tradition and on the ground of what is already his own expressive heritage. We believe that he will not abandon his affective starting point and the measure of artistic sensitivity he has shown, and thereby will confirm his already well-established place in new Croatian art.
The joy of quickly finding one’s own space and one’s own expression may become darkened or fade under the pressure of self-satisfied repetition. However, it would also be a pity to let go of a thread once discovered, or to give up on what has been gained (in terms of subject matter, motifs, disciplines) and not try to move on, deepen, and develop the sensed possibilities of expression, branches or side streams. When it is a matter of the traditional medium of painting or the now classical genre of the landscape, it would seem that all possibilities were exhausted long ago and the basic options used up in the works of previous generations.
Hari Ivančić, however, has succeeded in speaking out in a convincing and authentic manner about the complex, visual truth of the Istrian landscape. He chose to testify creatively to the setting in which he was born and where he lives and works, and he got to work immediately after finishing his studies. Over a little more than a decade of work, he has already created a relevant opus, coherent and homogenous, both in terms of his dominant thematic incentive, and his serious attitude to the premises of his craft. He started with what was seen and experienced, but he did not stop at fleeting impressions or atmospheric changes, but he reduced the world in question before his easel to its basic rhythms, to vital symbols, to the logic of gravitation, with a tendency to refined sublimation.
From the very beginning Ivančić painted his homeland seen from a bird’s eye view, from high up (from the top of a hill), as the land spread out, as though straining towards infinity. On the surfaces of his paintings, the fields, plains and clearings are arranged horizontally with narrow belts of horizon under the very top edge. This remainder of “sky” has absolutely no mimetic function, but it comes in handy as orientation for a careful understanding of the picture, as a signal that the force lines of the painting are quietly settling on one another or that they are drawn together by gravity, pulled downwards.
On Ivančić’s early pictures the horizon still showed a slim cypress tree or perhaps a cubic house, so the picture was given a recognizable denotation of character, a form of “metaphysical dimension”, with the appropriate melancholic nostalgia, with the patina of days long past. The artist, in removing the final remains of the illustration of the setting, was not moving towards abstraction, but this came from the need to emphasize the artistic characteristics of the visual basis, and of course the structure of substances used.
We must, for who knows which time, remind ourselves of the famous saying that one should tend one’s own garden, or go on trying to make systematic use of the soil from which we originate. In the case of Hari Ivančić, tending his garden is in no way literal (neither is the landscape of Buzet tame like a garden), but the way the painting is treated has similarities to digging, ploughing, turning furrows, weeding excess additions. That is to say, the paint is added in thick layers, which seem to melt into one another, or partially overlap, crossing one over another, but not covering the lower layer completely. The roughness, the relief of the pigments, also adds something direct, decisive, “workmanlike”, so the painting, despite being organized and structured, retains in itself the spark of organic life, the ability to renew itself, so to speak.
It seems that Hari Ivančić succeeds in reconciling a maternal ecstasy of informal origins with a structural understanding of the composition of a scene. He is assisted in this by the fundamental strictures of the motif itself, the fact that the division of the landscape is geometric in itself, that the lines of fencing and hedging are mainly orthogonal, that the lines of the ploughed field are of necessity parallel. Ivančić’s paintings are regularly composed, with the moderate rhythm of parallel bands, the skilful juxtaposition of darker and lighter areas, the balanced exchange of tectonic “arsis” and “thesis”.
The artist’s view of the land at times seems to be a view of the open sea, since he sees and interprets its elements; he feels its character of powerful restrained motion, in its thick waves. Even in use of colour, Ivančić at times is close to the sea, giving way to the challenge of the blues and strong purples. But the main colours in his titles are drawn from the Istrian geological map, mentioning the white, grey and red soils. Whilst the red comes with a bright, flaming glow, in all the other solutions he prefers closed, muted, subdued tones, where at times a detail breaks through from what appear to be ashes with a stronger emphasis.
On the screens of Ivančić’s canvases there are lines of parallel strokes, one above the other, flowing, stripes or ribbons of appropriate colours, creating ten or more vertical levels. A slight move away from the horizontal adds some dynamics, and spots or smudges arising from his temperamental mood give meaning and life to the linear direction. Aware of the danger of the overwhelming principle of the horizontal organization of the scene, the artist recently has tended to interpolate elements to “disturb” or break up the structural continuity, in order to create or achieve balance in the more complex concept of his composition. We could use musical language to speak of a staccato effect, or the introduction of deliberate “buzzing” into clear tonality.
Concluding with a presentation of the current phase of Ivančić’s art, we assess highly the skill of his gestures and use of colour, and express our respect for his fidelity to his original principles, but we will not forget to praise his need to gradually enrich his range of subject matter, we give credit for his vocation not to rest on his laurels, but once again (and over and over) to test the reasons and possibilities of his own interpretation of the world to which he is emotionally and existentially bound.
Every exhibition is actually a little walk (šetnica) by which the artist himself, and after him many others, passes through his life; they stop where they should and where they should not, whenever they sense or recognise something, more often they disappear as though they were never even there. They do not know what they have seen, they do not sense anything, they do not understand anything, they do not notice that the painting is a system of signs, they do not realise that this is the language of art.
Am I, precisely because of them, so scrupulous that I weigh every word so I do not fall into the trap of the destiny of those who pass through Something as though they were passing through Nothing?
I did not write the word “little walk” by chance nor lightly: this terminus technicus of the old Dubrovnik country house (šetnica) serves alongside so many other titles – such as little path, way, or syntagma: a footpath, an access etc for the most precise possible comparison of the artist’s “life’s path” (whether it be the entire path or merely a segment of that path) with a path on which a man walks. Only these ancient words (in Croatian) suit me precisely, only they can express the whole truth of this Way. A little walk is what marks the place of a “channelled” walk, a path under surveillance, a place of selfcontrol, a path that is cultivated and maintained, and at the same time a line of Order in the natural “Superorder” or “Disorder” of its growth and blossoming, with the indisputable task of drawing a line between the cultivated and the natural (however small that kingdom may be, however restricted those worlds may be).
The exhibition hall is indeed that smallest form of “little walk” on the one side the works (the world of culture) and on the other side (symbolically) the world of Nature or Technology, the world of Nonart, which lives with no need for interpretation, reading, illuminating. An old and famous namesake of this artist, Ljubo Ivančić, whilst going round his own retrospective exhibition in the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, in 1979, just before the opening, said resignedly to his friends, “Your whole life, and you can go round it in an hour”. Of course depending on the nature and range of the exhibition there can be endless variations on that theme: You could say for example: five years of work – and you can walk past it all in seven minutes.
The steps we are taking now too, beside the paintings by Hari Ivančić, are a walk that divides like that, beside the works, which – on the other side – break with all those ideas, all those (divided) incidents which the spirits of feeble productivity, but powerful eros of abjuration and suppression of that which is not theirs or different, what has always been and “the old”, on behalf of the undefined, unformed new – these are powerfully opposed. But if we add to that “other side” that we do not degrade wisdom nor (the possible) truth of the works or manifest breaks which in this (Ivančić’s idiom) will oppose with all the strength of their not necessarily unconvincing arguments, about the end of traditional (artistic) language and the need for a new language, syntax, lexicon. Opposite to this, today many – maybe most critical world views – stand as the guardians of the side of reality and the dreams of this side – why not? A young artist, his traditionalism, his mythic, traditional iconosphere (land, Gea..) his persistence in varying his themes, his readiness for serious work, his passion and hope that good cannot be in vain, that positive work cannot be lost in a negative space but it will survive in mockery of these hopes, like a reef on an island of safety. It is not justifiable to describe him as arrogant because of this attitude, since his ambition deserves that epithet far less than the destructive urge of the others. At the same time, we notice that satisfaction is worthwhile when a critic notices that the strongest and most fruitful vein of Croatian modern art – which has almost died out over the past few years – is being renewed in such a magnificent manner: both as a genre and as a specific clear thought with an innumerable inflow of values. There is no doubt it will encourage others too; a young man has once more opened up a wide path, which had become impassable and over grown with weeds. Are we aware of what this could mean? (Even when aware of the momentary limitations and the sincere execution).
Let us see: what was it and what is going on now? The Croatian Modern tradition in painting took the landscape, as its fundamental, existential genre. Alongside several indicative landscapes by Belo Csikos, the first great dramatic, monochrome landscapes in this region were by Vidović. However not even they, despite their untouchable nature, could not bear the title of the genre of landscape. At their deepest level they belong to the confessional works by Croatian artists at the turn of the century: they are more like landscapes of the soul than parts of the world, moreover: they are mystic, symbolic seascapes…the rare landscape works by Bukovac could also not affirm the genus, and Medović and Crnčić were from the beginning seascape artists. Anyone who is bothered that this sets up a dubious (?) hierarchy – by which painting land meant painting a landscape and painting the sea meant painting a seascape – marina should be told that this is only following the logic of the original –Croatian krajolik using the term “kraj” for a painting of land (cf. “hvali more, drž se kraja” – Praise the sea but stick to the land!). It is the same in English (landscape) German (Landschaft), French (paysage), Italian (paesaggio), Spanish (paisaje) where the basic German compound word “land” and the Romance one pays, paes, pais, are again land. Ferdo Kovačević to some extent established the genre of landscape, and if he may be criticised at all then it is by the remark that in terms of style his work takes us back to a more conservative variant of impressionism, and I would rather choose as the beginning of modern landscape painting an expression which, better than Kovačić, communicates with the ideas of the European Modern (in all its specific variations) at the very end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. If we start with this assumption then Ljubo Babić’s work is well and truly anchored at the very peak of Modern Croatian (landscape) art, which embodies several vital ingredients of modernism: the cosmic interest, the cosmic vision, the general world and general human themes (the Bible and others). Of all these, the most important for Babić were the cosmic visions, the high and lofty viewpoint from which the artist, as though from a mountain top, observes deep, lost, cavernous pictures of the earth and the movements of the ant people. Then it was already noticeable that the physical reduction of the human form depersonalises the contents of the picture, and strengthens some of its structural and tectonic characteristics. Babić moreover, as the most important art educationalist of the 20th century in Croatia, succeeded in infecting almost all his talented pupils with his ideas (Šimunović, Mušić, Motika, Gliha, Dulčić, Murtić) or at least leading them to seriously consider landscapes (Steiner, Kopač, Vaništa, Lj. Ivančić, Biffel), even in some other direction. But is it only Babić we have to thank for this? Or was the landscape the common ground of the Croatian eye and the Croatian destiny. I have always tended towards this view and I still do, for some other important Croatian artists (independently of Babić) gave a powerful vision to the landscape (Tartaglia, Šulentić, Šohaj, Job, Kaštelančić), without mentioning those for whom a traditional interpretation of landscapes made up a significant part of their artistic work (Miše, Bulić, Šestić, Postružnik, Veža, Filakovac and others). Taming the land and defending the land were the centuries long obsessions of the Croats, and the bitter battle for survival fought on the line of destruction – on the last defensive bridge – these are famous reliquiale reliquiarum – did its job: a piece of earth was a motif of Croatian secular metaphysics; especially in places where the earth was rocky, where it took up the whole of a man, but also there where it was most resistant. Only in this way were the magnificent visions able to come into being that mark the entire opus of Šimunović and Gliha. This great and powerful original led us through its elaborations (Tartaglia, Šimunović, Gliha, Dulčić, Murtić, Mušič, Motika,Vaništa, Lj. Ivančić…) to the abstraction of nature and the fact that abstract paintings proving their metaphysical nature and their capabilities in modern languages. It may be noted that blood flowed through the abstract works of these masters; that existential energy of existence, and they never fell into formalist molds. When, after his immediate predecessors – to mention only Eugen Kokot – Hari Ivančić turned to the land, its was visible that this was the same syndrome at work: defence of the ground through apotheosis, the reduction of orientational figurative signs, the use of metaphysical diminutives (pars pro foto), the translation of the global Gea into an upright plate (which brings up to date Gliha’s basic thought: that the earth is a huge cosmic book – a register, a charter – in which our destinies are written).
Ivančić’s personal range is that repetitio by which he, with no desire for the figurative, for play, without a desire for exciting changes in rhythm and colour, merely by repeating the horizontal layers (mostly) of the same colour and their dividing lines (also) in the same colours – important: twocoloured pictures grey and black, black and white, red and black, white and red, to remain with the paradigm simplification – present the world as a line of troubles and a line of the unconquerable and so on in series of six to sixteen and more layers. The present horizontal series of lines emphasises tectonic stability, the stability of the order, its immovability, its hierarchical nature (up and down), its permanency. In the general turmoil of all there is, Ivančić seeks to and can establish his lands. If we say too that seen from a linguistic viewpoint, he also offers us most often the white and red lands, I have said that he promises us the bipolarity of the world: the white ether, as the whiteness of the air and the red of blood, like the ruddiness of the secular – a figure of spirit and body, the astral and the material.
Whilst in his older paintings, he would discreetly show, up in one or two of the upper corners, the cube of a house or a cypress tree – as a paradigm of the human world – with “catacombs” with “trenches” in the underground, evoking from far away some ancient landscape code of Biffel – his newer paintings have been turned to different form of expression: he no longer relies on Bachelard symbols of a house or a cypress tree, but sends the message in the rougher materialisation of the soil, with the minimum number of signs. This has begun to set him apart as the legitimate heir of the mighty Frane Šimunović: sparse like Goya, dark like Goya, acerbic like Goya. In a few words: the expression of one who guards the land.
Contemporariness, it seems, removes the category of time from the process of observation, experience and witnessing the essence. We are fooled by time, or time has deceived us. We are not in harmony. Time has remained there somewhere, behind us. We are in a timeless zone of wandering, and artistic scepticism, instead of participating, we witness the value of memory. The essence and the being elude us, and the subject remains an anonymous being without any interaction with the world, caught in the trap of crazy acceleration and absolute technocracy. The machine is at war with creation, because by definition it produces in series, growing from the bed of a given program, instead of according to the nature of its creative intuition. Where is there a person, watching the world with slow observation? Where is there any space sufficient for alignment of the rhythm of the heart with the rhythm of nature, the space of authentic balance? Does the landscape still exist as a category of living immediacy? Do we feel in our eyes the vibrations of the living colour and in our senses its juices and gradations?L’homme témoin witnesses only the hysteria of his own resourcefulness in the world, which does not seem to care about man, or, perhaps, testifies of man who no longer cares about the world.
In this above all dark image of the state of things, the artist is the greatest casualty of his calling. His skill (technique) is left without the support of truth (aletheia). In that context the glorification of historical values is natural. Consciously or unconsciously, the potential of creativity strives to impregnate heritage. To build on it, as on life itself. This is a wearisome game, hard work, full of doubt and self-examination. As a result each newly occurring variation is questioned through the innumerable replication of the suggested possibilities it conceals. In that sense painting, not long after the end of the Second World War, moved along the path just laid by the fate of the world, which our generation holds in its hands as a confusing inheritance, amazed at a heritage that is so hard to follow.
Painting in the nineteen-sixties hurried with famous “aesthetic speed”, through “reduction” and “informality” and through cynical illustrativeness and all forms of intellectual intervention, finally, destroying all its authentic presumptions. Today people do not actually paint pictures, or they paint them in league with the past. Contemporary painters, who we believe or feel to be worthy of our attention, reanimate some historical suggestion. They do this through eclectic collections of entire series of historical derivatives, or, on the other hand, by systematic analysis of one of those sensed possibilities. The second case, which due to the exploratory approach I have mentioned, I would like to call “the analytical model”, is characterized by very productive cycles of entire series of similar pictures, where the series of these replicas differ from one another mainly in the realm of the internal dynamism of the use of artistic elements (colour, composition, scenes…).-
Hari Ivančić is one of the generation of artists caught in the contemporary crisis of painting and art in general. In the same way, he belongs to a group of artists who are passionate and determined, and above all stubborn in their exploration of the possibilities of survival within the realm of only one medium (used without hindrance). Hari Ivančić does not resort to experiments, multi-media exploration, quips, intellectual meandering. Of all contemporary vices, he will hold to only those forms of visual communication that are void of polemics, when it is a case of possibly more radical opposition to the regime of aesthetics full of expectation.
Having graduated from the Zagreb Art Academy, and when with incredible success he stepped out onto the artistic scene, and was accepted by the public and critics, producing a series of works, exhibitions and recognition, Ivančić presented himself in the quite small scale, metaphysical, flat construction, the interesting colours and statically convincing scheme of towns, as a form of the internal heart of belonging and a collecting place of impressions. Here the impressions in the panoramic habitat, from the very beginning hinted at his course towards the internal world of his subject. In a form of intimacy, or even a quite closed personality, with an ear ready for a refined sound, over time he respectfully stepped out of the given spaces of his figurative scenes, into the almost abstract field of his still recognizable predilection for landscape. His already existing tendency, as the genius loci of his imagination, was and remains the red soil of Istria. Ivančić the artist, slowly moving into change, still retains some of the features of his earlier paintings. The first of these is the composition. The interface of the surfaces and their rhythmically conceived relationship insinuates the only hinted at depth of the perspective. In the latest series he irresistibly invokes the deep rifts in the vertical perspective. Our trained gaze reads the layers of the surface of broad fields of earth, mixed with rocks. The scene never has a front or back, but as a rule it has upper and lower layers of life. They are never sorted as though lined up like a frieze, but as a static, firm construction of blocks of earth, which are potentially seismic, with light breaking through into their deepest depths. This illusion of light in the depths of the layers of the earth is sectioned into selected colour monoliths, indicating life that exists, that boils and flourishes within.
The field surfaces, divided in this way, giving each other dynamics through a variety of proportional values, different coloured grids and subtle play with the scope of the tonal scale, are again divided within themselves by vertical or diagonal stripes, zones, strokes and parcelled structural moves. The moves are as a rule calm, repeated, thickly placed layers of colour, with increasingly frequent tiny cracks of white, on which in places contrasting marks (smaller strokes) intervene.
This habit of the artist is certainly along the lines of his examination of the impression of his own natural environment, but it is also a well thought out polygon for expression of colour, as the most important artistic element of Ivančić’s artistic language. In these paintings all is subjective but leading to the external, universal principles of the construction. In these paintings, in the same way, everything is almost abstract, but also leading to the external, universal principles of a recognizable form. The soil, seen as earth, is the basis and support, the archetypal world of the subject and observer. The base. The beginning. Solid ground. Adorned by light, this principle of the firmness of the earth is decomposed into the sensual but also passionate principle of man’s eternal return to it.
I cannot avoid, in the end, the touch of the past and tradition. The body of models from the early European post-war period in the fifties and sixties of the past century. For example, early Antoni Tapies (not in terms of composition but in the structure of the artistic touch and a form of signature): “Corroded surfaces, cracks, half-naked landscapes convey a sense of layers of complexity … The painted surfaces appear to be worn out by their long existence … Manual processes shape the identity of forms determined by time, make elegance into the natural outcome of partial destruction …”
There is of course Nicolas de Stael here too, with his decorative-figurative coloured blocks of rhythmically organized squares, installed in a composition containing figurative connotations, his colours showing a high level of manoeuvring in the light of strong shades, the style, which in the end allows him to be seen figuratively, although at the same time it contains a particular tendency towards abstraction.
Hari Ivančić then, in a series of almost identical scenes, demolishes the monolith of his former closedness. With each new exhibition, the boundaries of artistic freedom are opened. He does this gradually, slowly, sometimes timidly, but as a rule we see the result in his solid and sure approach, which (I imagine) will be hard to detach from the landscape context. The land remains: the matrix… the metre… maieutics… the myth… Illumined, it glows in colour: a range of warm colours (like the sun) and a range of cold colours (like the moon) and a hinted range of artificial colour (like the internal testing of new possibilities).