Duration of exhibition
4. - 31.03.2010
Per aspera ad astra
On the work of Izvor Pende
Photography - Photography is at the centre of Izvor Pende's work. The artist does not use it as an artistic medium sui generis. He is not interested in photography as an artistic image. Rather, photography serves Pende to capture impressions of reality that seem worthy of painting at the moment of their discovery and which he wishes to translate into art. For Pende, photography replaces the sketchbook of the old masters. In such sketches, the later work was depicted in statu nascendi in short circuit with reality. This is why the Renaissance theorist Federico Zuccaro compared the drawing to the divine act of creation. He saw it as the first illumination of the idea of the work. In this function, photography in Pende's work can certainly be related to the traditional task of drawing for painting. The only difference is that the drawing hand already makes modifications to the appearance of reality. This is done in accordance with the painter's disegno interiore, with the image of his later work, which is not possible with photography. In photography, the artist's conceptual images remain in the subjunctive for the time being. They are purely optative. This is why Izvor Pende is by no means interested in painting over his photographs, as the so-called photorealists among the painters did with their pictures. They were delighted when their painted pictures were mistaken for real photographs because they completely deceived the viewer's eyes. Pende, on the other hand, assembles a fictional world from the photographic images of reality even before he picks up his paintbrush. He collages different photographs. For example, a ship from Hamburg harbour and the coast of Dalmatia come together. In the course of the act of painting, something completely new emerges from this alliance. The ship becomes a boat-shaped rocky outcrop, and the sea and sky of the painted picture are also composed of impressions from different photographs in the work entitled "Coast" (2009).
Painting - Izvor Pende reduces, omits, adds and condenses. He concentrates and essentialises in his painting. The comparison of photography and painting makes this unmistakably clear. However, this also means that the law of mimesis, of reproducing the visible as realistically as possible, no longer applies to him - as it could not be otherwise for a contemporary painter. If there is a normative guideline for Pende, then it is, with recourse to the beautiful words of Paul Klee: "Do not reproduce the visible, but make it visible." Such a norm began to become the painter's maxim when photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. As it depicts reality as it is more competently than painting, it enables the latter to achieve a whole new level of freedom. The time of Zeuxis' grapes, which - as the story goes - the birds of the sky hungrily pounced on, and Apelles' painted curtains was finally over. Modernity is dawning, and the painter is now concerned with penetrating into the heart of the grapes, tearing the curtains apart and allowing the images behind the visible reality to take shape. The mirror as a metaphor for painting has had its day. Like Lewis Carroll's "Alice", the contemporary painter is called upon to go behind the mirror and tell us what he sees there. Izvor Pende's series of works bear witness to his journey behind the mirror. When he deals with themes such as women or the sea in ever new pictures, he gives the lie to the myth of both the singular and the ultimate picture. The variation of the ever-same in Pende's painting is a subtle parable not only of the relativity of the gaze and what is seen. It also makes it clear that reality can no longer be summarised in painted universals. There is not just one valid image of the world. Pende's glazing style of painting, which superimposes various thin layers of colour, provides the formal equivalent. His painting style, quick as it is, has the necessary power to react to a changed perception of the world and reality in a correspondingly supple manner. Its fluid style demonstrates an enlightened presence of mind in which the fleeting and ephemeral nature of all appearances is simultaneously cancelled out.
Series - The gestural swiftness of Pende's style is often contrasted by the meticulous precision with which he captures his subjects. In this context, just look at the wood and façade structure of his summer house in the work of the same name from 2009, which shimmers in different shades of colour and is strictly delineated from one another. This house has also travelled a long way to end up on the Dalmatian coast in the artist's painting. Pende got to know it while visiting a quarantine camp, photographed it and placed it in the melancholy, shadow-soaked sun and summer idyll of his painting. The dialectic of form and content that we observe here is generally a major part of the appeal of his paintings, in which Pende not only combines different moods, but also different painting styles. He subtly changes the perspective on his subject from picture to picture. Constantly varying and differentiating a subject in different works, as he does, promotes the emancipation of the viewer from the picture. Instead of painting-esque immersion, the artistic work in series forces the viewer to compare images and thus to see critically. Izvor Pende's strategy is reminiscent of the famous gesture by Bertolt Brecht, who had a banner displayed in the theatre in the 1920s with the words: "Don't stare so romantically!" Brecht did not want the audience to identify emotionally with what was happening on stage, but rather to intellectually penetrate it. The viewer should understand himself better at the end of the theatre visit. The tua res agitur that emerges behind this, the claim that art has to negotiate the cause of man and thus of each individual viewer, is an age-old aesthetic demand. It is also valid in Pende's paintings. It lifts them out of the purely private and biographical and makes them universally binding. Pende's pictures concern us in an existential way. Their serial character resembles an experimental arrangement. Viewing them becomes a journey to ourselves. Each viewer becomes his own Columbus. Except that instead of America, they discover themselves.
Portrait Sea - In his latest series of works, Izvor Pende repeatedly portrays a young woman and the sea. Either each subject on its own, the woman often in the interior of a house, and the sea as part of a coastal landscape. Or both together, with the young woman, absorbed in the sight of the sea, usually appearing as a figure from behind in the picture. The titles of the pictures inform us that the protagonist is called "Bubu" and "Dance" the stretch of coast near Dubrovnik, the city where Pende, who was born in Zagreb, spent a large part of his youth and where he also experienced the Balkan War. Basically, however, these attributions by name play virtually no role when viewing the paintings. Pende is less interested in the singular and individual than in the general and essential. His sea is not the specific, topographically localised sea of the Adriatic, even when he focuses on a specific island off the coast, as in the series of "Lokrum" paintings. Instead, Pende is interested in depicting the state of the sea, as it could appear in one way or another anywhere in the world where we encounter the sea. He paints it lying calm, still and smooth, domesticated by the tides like a well-behaved pet or roaring and foaming up like a wild beast charging against the coast. The colours in which he immerses the sea, sky and coast in his paintings even deny the original origin of the subject. We never see colour tones that are even remotely reminiscent of the sun-bathed Dalmatian coast. The pictures are not very cheerful. They are immersed in melancholy, dark blue or grey tones that turn them into melancholy meditation panels. They are much more reminiscent of the seas of the North and Baltic Seas than the Adriatic. Once again, Pende does not draw his images from mimesis. Reality does not serve him as a mirror for his art, but rather, as described, he looks behind the mirror and thus behind reality. He collages and fictionalises his impressions. In this way, he creates a kind of essence in the picture from what he has seen and experienced. When we look at his paintings, we do not see the world, but the world filtered through the temperament and temperature of the painter. "L' art, c' est le monde vu par un tempérament", as Emile Zola, the great novelist, once wrote to his friend Paul Cézanne.
Portrait of women - Art gives us the world as the artist's temperament sees it. World ("monde") and temperament ("tempérament"), representation and modification - these are the levers that also determine the depiction of women in Izvor Pende's work. Despite the recognisability of the protagonist, her portrait is also less interested in the individual than in the essential. This urge to transcend the personal portrait into a universally valid one bears witness to the artist's platonic longing to reach the heart of people and things with his pictures. Just as the image of the sea in Pende's work shows supra-individual facets, so too do the many portraits of the young woman called Bubu. We see her slender, beautiful figure and her delicate face with her open, black hair and dark, thoughtful eyes in different situations. Pende often depicts her indoors, standing at a window and looking out, or sitting and lying on a bed in a bedroom. She wears tight black panties and a shirt of the same colour. The manner of her appearance directs the viewer's gaze on the one hand to the field of erotic reception. On the other hand, any desire is immediately and decisively repelled by the melancholy mood of the pictures. The predominant and defining blue tones link the portraits with Pende's sea views. The protagonist is completely absorbed in herself. None of her gaze seeks the viewer's eye. And she is always alone in these pictures. Her appearance thus thematises less the joys of an erotic encounter than the fundamental loneliness of human beings. We are born alone and we die alone. Every pain we have to endure is ours alone. An embrace, however firm, is always only a temporary consolation. It is precisely this conditio fundamantalis of the human being that is the main theme of the pictures. They turn these portraits into monuments to human forlornness. Despite their personal contours, Bubu is transformed under the painter's hand. In Pende's work, the character portrait becomes an allegory in which the viewer finds themselves.
Melancholy - In comparative recourse to art history, we observe a remarkable reversal in Izvor Pende's series of works. Think of Botticelli's radiant beauties, the "Primavera", the "Birth of Venus" or the "Pallas with the Centaur"! In them, mythical figures take on individual traits with such intensity that Botticelli's contemporaries believed they recognised certain women from Florentine society. And when we look at them today, we hardly feel any differently. Despite the ideality of their depiction, we believe that we see in them first and foremost the personal portraits of unmistakable women. In Botticelli's painting, the general is transformed into the individual, whereas in Pende's work, as we have seen, the opposite is the case. What they have in common, however, is the theme of melancholy. Botticelli's women, too, with their slender limbs, show a generally introverted, melancholy and melancholic expression on their faces surrounded by rich golden hair. The character of melancholy was first analysed by the Greek physician Hippocrates. For him, it is one of four possible temperaments that determine the nature of human beings. According to him, our temperament depends on the ratio in which yellow and black bile, phlegm and blood mix in our body. If they combine harmoniously, we have a balanced temperament. If one juice is dominant, this results in character traits. Hippocrates attributes the appearance of melancholy to an excess of black bile in our body. This has an influence on the soul. The melancholic looks sadly at the world and reality. In our time, the American essayist Susan Sontag sees the cause of melancholy in the legacy of intellectuals. For her, they were born under the sign of Saturn. Their business is thinking, and that makes us sad, because it constantly reminds us of our mortality. Marcel Duchamp drew our attention to the fact that people normally suppress this with his epitaph, which cannot be surpassed in terms of ironic malice. On his gravestone we read: "D' ailleurs, c' est toujours les autres qui meurent." (For the rest, it's always the others who die).
Back figure - The depiction of melancholy has always appealed to writers and artists. The fact that thinking and sadness form a tandem is shown iconographically in the pose of the head resting heavily in the hand of the propped-up arm, which we find in Albrecht Dürer's "Melencolia I" and Auguste Rodin's "Le Penseur", among others. The figure turning his back to us in the paintings of the Romantics, e.g. in the works of Gustav Carus and Caspar David Friedrich, represents another form of thoughtful contemplation. Their view of the world is representative of us. When we look at creation with them, the painters want us to see it through their eyes as a mirror of the soul. Marvelling at the majesty of a moonlit night, as in a painting by Carus, in which the artist seems moved by Immanuel Kant's insight that above him is "the starry sky" and within it "the moral law". Or moved by the sublime nature of a mighty mountain range like Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog". Or shaken by the infinite vastness and grandeur of the sea, like his little "Monk by the Sea", at the sight of which Heinrich von Kleist once had the feeling that his eyelids were "as if cut away". Even if there is a sense of horror in the last picture at the possibility of a world that has fallen out of all order, the predominant feeling of romantic contemplation of reality is the certainty of being suspended in a pantheistically interwoven creation. When we look at the sea with Pende's back figures, with his women, this security is gone for the time being. The title of the series of works, "The Distance of God", is a clear indication of this. But distance does not mean non-existence. Distance rather means a deus absconditus, a hidden God. Perhaps he can be discovered behind the impression of the meaninglessness of existence, behind the endlessly rolling waves of the sea and the emotional and existential vicissitudes of life in spite of everything. Albert Camus' "Caligula" already describes the absurdity of the human condition with the words: "People die, and they are not happy." But Izvor Pende's pictures basically know better. Light creeps into them again and again. An ingenious dramaturgy illuminates - faintly but emphatically - the blue sea views and the blue rooms in which his women - with us - reflect on themselves and life. Per aspera ad astra.
Michael Stoeber