TRIP
trip_200150The choice of the three Istrian artists exhibiting in Dea Orh Gallery was neither arbitrary nor unintentional. Their dedication and loyalty to the painterly medium, with painting regarded as manual artistic activity, is what singles them out from the exceptionally vigorous and dinamic Istrian artistic scene. On the other hand, that does not imply that the three of them feel resentment for or in any other way deliberately disregard the world of modern media and new technologies surrounding them.

And indeed, Bičić, Pauletta and Šumonja have often boldly ventured in artistic genres other than painting and by doing so have proven themselves as versatile creators of installations, objects, photography, etc... Nevertheless, we are dealing with full-blooded painters who express their respective attitudes and materialize their artistic habitus and authorial credo through painting and are recognized as peculiar and accomplished authors.

Being a painter in time of global digitalization is as much anachronic as it is challenging. Since Hegel there have been many acrimonious debates on the death of art, the end of painting to be more exact. Painting has been constantly challenged by increasingly demanding tasks which could be poorly expressed by means of traditional methods and classic artistic practices. The value and grandness of today's painters both lie in their ability to have recourse to such methods which will imbue the canvas and all its content with inner life and make it interesting, intriguing and contemporary. It is almost their mission to do so. It is in that sense that the three authors assert themselves as due inheritors and guardians of the „sacred“ trade of painting. In doing so, each one of them resorts to his or her unique and inimitable painterly maniera as well as use of different approaches and strategies in order to permeate their respective works with an aura of contemporariness and uniqueness. In other words, the work of the abovementioned authors is pregnant with a remarkably comprehensive experience which originates from a deep understanding of art history and an extraordinary notion of all the vast possibilities of its quotation and paraphrasing. It is in this very like manner, which is the starting point and common place of every eclecticism, that the artists, each within the framework of his or her work, make ample use of elements borrowed from other visual arts, namely film, photography, video and comic art, and making them integral parts of contemporary painterly expression. This is the idea, one among many other connotations, suggested by the title of this exhibition, Trip.

Tea Bičić, the youngest of the three authors, has defined the fundamental principles of her art early during her student days, and has been practising a very specific and defined maniera of painting as well as following a distinctive painterly approach ever since. This author presents herself with an opus of a very conspicuous title, Traces of Birds, the title itself bearing strong reminiscence of painterly practice close to the art of Enformel and Action Painting. And indeed, her role models and the origin of this peculiar reinterpretation by quotation are to be found in this very and probably greatest adventure in the American and European painting of the 20th century. The idea of the otherworldly and the oniric, of that which is beyond words, contained in the vast repertoire of fine and frail matter, is merging and colliding with the solid substance of the painting which at the end is a result of a resolute and somewhat unexpected handwriting. Her painting is to be defined as the painting of gesture and matter. It is a kind of painting which implies procedure and process, the painting of the dripping colour and its metamorphosed shades, such painting which happens in a blink of an eye, and almost unfolds in front of us. It is a very precise and unpredictable kind of painting, we might even call it avanturistic. But it would be an overstatement to claim that Tea abandons herself to the subconscious or yields involuntarily to the chaos of the unconscious, attaching no importance whatsover to the final aesthetic result. Her paintings are a result of improvisation and concentrated reaction following a premeditated artistic aspiration. Her art is strongly marked by a newly found and almost unstable and changing balance. The size and the shape of her canvases seem to support the aforesaid: all the paintings are square-like, with all the sides of equal length, the square being a symbol of balance between the ecstatic emotionality of the vertical and the rational, mind-oriented horizontal.
Tea uses a very reduced palette; white, black, red and gray together create a powerful and suggestive colorism, such as can be found in alchemical symbolism. Her painting is above all a result of a strong need to paint, of this almost magical practice which forces one to face his or hers own desires, fears, dreams... There is also a certain aesthetic quality in her paintings appearing as an almost casual side efect, a certain trait of flirtatious quality which made her art meet with wide approval of both critcs and public from the very beginning.

Robert Pauletta makes ample use of diverse techniques and resorts to different methods and approaches  in order to express and materialize his complex, often even controversial opus. This time he presents himself with two almost contradictory cycles, that only substantiates the fact that we are dealing with an exceptionally vigorous and potent painter.
The paintings belonging to his Trees cycle present Pauletta as a painter of a luxuriant, often overtly untamed palette and an exuberant and generous handwriting. These paintings, although drawing inspiration from the real, material world, are on the verge of abstraction. They give us an insight into a parallel world in which a certain weird geometric logic exists side by side with organic and floral motifs, which seem to belong more to the realm of fantasy than to the real world. His is a painting of pleasure and intimacy, a kind of painting which strongly believes in and trusts the painterly principles; which is as bodily and material as much as cheerful and hedonistic.  
The other cycle of paintings is entitled All Alone. It is a sublimation of experience of several of his former artistic methods and approaches in which he explored the possibilities of advertisements and media in order to reconsider social and political codes.
Painting is above all a very intimate act. Pauletta's categorical reductionism and eloquent conciseness give us insight into the world of soulsearching through self-questioning. Far from being narcissoid, which might be the first impression of a naive beholder, we are dealing with, above all, an auto-biographical kind of painting which expresses the artist's attitude towards himself and towards the world surrounding him. A great distinctive trait of art is that it gives one the oportunity to put oneself into the position of another person, to empathize and to identify with others. In that way other people's destinies become our own, at least for a moment.

Bojan Šumonja is the author of an outstandingly prolific and gigantic opus. His art grew
and draw from the art of Transvanguard and New Wave painting during the 1980s when Šumonja was student at the Venetian Accademia di Belle Arti. Šumonja is a thoroughbred painter who often draws inspiration from the great painters of the past. There were many instances in which we found Šumonja engaged in a vivid dialogue, polemics or playful discussion with Velasquez, Van Gogh, Manet... His peculiar and well-defined painting is at the same time both nostalgic and humorous reminiscence of great painters from the past, great moments of painting and art in general, now gone. It is also a persevering and unthwarted comment on his own preoccupations. It is the art of irrational moments, of exciting hallucinations and, of late, an increasingly frequent comment on the actual political and social context. In his latest work, Šumonja portrays a world in which the outer reality and the inner one interweave, following a weird logic, distinctive of the author. It is at the same time both trivialized and, by use of allegory, idealized.
His Sheep seem unimportant and banal but are at the same time strongly suggestive. They are the voice of the outer world surrounding the author, but also of his inner one, his intimacy. And indeed, Šumonja's art created a world populated by fictitious characters who became a point of reference in everyday life.
On one hand, his painting is characterised by an exceptional visual humour which is a trait shared by all great and authentic artists, while on the other hand it sometimes abounds in the everyday and unavoidable pathos which makes life – pathetic. Šumonja's perseverance and clear painterly imagination created a paralel world of peculiar scenes and events which became the equivalent of the real, everyday world. Can we expect more from art?