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Anton HORVATOVIC
PAINTING AS TEMPTATION AND REDEMPTION (PAINTING FROM NOWHERE OR WHERE DID THE PAINTING COME FROM) “In this moment two shadows, delineated behind him by the cross’ arms, leaped forward. And gave birth to an apparition resembling two large horns; Anthony cried out: Protect me, oh God, and the Shadow returned to its former place.” (...) A reference to bodies and symbols in space, and their description (deconstruction) in painting, an enigmatic narrative woof, the allegoresis and traditionally transmitted iconographies within the painting idiom: this is a sphere of research and study, of temptation and self-affirmation of artist (painter, musician) Anton Horvatovic. Before any (im)possible response to Cezzanean – Derridian promise / question of “Truth in Painting”, there precedes apprenticeship in swimming within academic “cold bath” (Nietzsche’s reference to classic philology). This is a jump into the always already given water of painting as tradition (Anton’s schooldays in Pula, Urbino.... studying the artwork of Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus.... period of painting, exhibiting, design work and music activity from 2000-2009). In other words the artist had to clear his own way in solving the riddle of constructing a painting as an autonomous body, 3D space and coloured surface, and at the same time the enigma of painting as a projective field of imagining, allegoresis, simulation and symbolization of something else, that gets incarnated in painting -as a medium of materialization of our concepts on things, thoughts, phantasms within that very same space. “With ‘black’ compositions, such as Apprenticeship and Affirmation and From Nowhere, I take interest in the negation of descriptive space and its reaffirmation as a painting’s surface. My paintings often feature lateral motifs at the actual frames. This hesitation between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality frequently torments me. However, I usually choose the way leading towards the opposing spatial ‘implosion’, characteristic of photography. I leave descriptive elements at the painting’s surface, with a tendency of moving towards real space. With regard to photography: sometimes I work according to photographs – which I make myself or which I hit upon. They are the starting point with a purely anatomical character – a camera obscura for fixating reality’s parts. However, my intention is not to imitate reality or photography within a format. I use figurative elements as notions. In a descriptive mode, and within the paintings (light effects, atmosphere, details), they are allusions to the experiential – the manner in which things are. They help me with my story. “ These were the words the painter used to de-scribe a scope pertaining to visual and aesthetical issues, which he also treated in his recent works (2007-2009) and whose selection is presented in this exhibition.
THE TEMPTATION OF ANTON THE PAINTER In Flaubert’s novel The Temptations of Saint Anthony, an imaginary -from a “shadow” position - follows the portended temptation of Painting. In the same way, the imaginary of Anton Horvatovic’s works comprises temptations from the lurking antique myths and mysteries of entire Mediterranean. Hence “Rijeka” in exhibition’s title ( transl. note: Rijeka literally means river) is not solely the city of Rijeka, as a Kvarner bay’s copula between islands and hinterland, but could also be Lethe, possessing mythological connotations, depending on direction of exploration and the paintings we observe. This imaginary includes many, from goddess Diana with her lions, dogs and deer to Orphicists and Hellenistic-Roman Gnostics to modern pre-figurations of ancient paintings and questions, seen through readings pieces by Thomas Stearns Eliot (Wasteland, Four Quartets....), mystical considerations on synesthesia, composing, the “mimesis” of music, dance, drama in paintings (Goethe and Steiner, big art names from and around Bauhaus circle, and our own Croatian master Šebalj). There are also Nietzschean, Pavesean, DeChiricoan, psychoanalytical reflections on questions of fear, Eros, death, temptation and redemption – on this occasion in time “after” the return(s) of the same - such as for example in works by Italian transvanguardists, German painters such as Baselitz, Immendorf, Merz, Kiefer, Young British Artists and the 1980s Croatian postmodernism. Anton H. brings his own peculiar path to conflict between ascetic and lascivious solutions (extremes, radicalism) in recent and contemporary painting. In the same time he does not renounce possible references and heritage of Symbolism, Metaphysical Painting, Magic Realism, nor does he give up the reading pieces by Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, being aware of new figurative masters’ (not exclusively New Figuration) existential and aesthetic contributions towards ethos and teleology of Painting, as well as to the gnosis, soteriology, eschatology of Painting today. Without knowledge on Faustus and Mephistopheles, on Snake and initiatory visions and temptations, on myths about Hero, Original Sin, crucified snake (on cross), a symbol of snake with Gnostics and Alchemists, that were always again thematized and re-examined by the tradition of symbolism and surrealism, one could hardly – except unconsciously, intuitively – initiate him/herself into the mystery of the scene. Apprenticeship and Affirmation. In treating landscapes the painter sometimes starts with his own apparitions, whereby he methodologically participates in the traditions of symbolism and surrealism. Every painting (especially today!) is in a sense variation, a hybrid union between “pittura metafisica” and “pittura immediata” ( as connoted by theoretician Peter Weibel), actually the mediatised painting. Only with postmodern conditions (Lyotard) this actual “fact” became a predominant theme, “the great story” on painting and its “return”. It is the theme above all other painting themes, myths and genres (portrait, self-portrait, nude, animalism, landscape, imaginary landscape, still nature, genre scenes, interiors / exteriors...), that can as well be discerned in this exhibition and in its spatial structuring inside the gallery. This essay’s introduction argued how “medium” of painting is penetrated by memory, shadowy anamnesis, scene, the mimesis of something. Like Anton, a painter copes with demons through issues of the ascetic overcoming of relation between “illusion” , “vision”, describing Something having two-dimensional surface through a threedimensional painting’s body. This “conflict” and the torments it afflicts on the painter as Novice / Initiate, is by no means only metier-wise, plastic, “solely artisan”. It assumes something of alchemic pains pertaining to solving how the “damned fourth”, the four-horned, snake should be added to 2D/3D structure. Namely, since the axiom proclaimed by Mary the Prophetess, an Egyptian woman, a Coptic woman, down to Einstein and Jung, and onwards as well, it is only with great pains and material resistance that mystery unfolds, the mystery of transgressing “three dimensions”, the trans-aesthetic “Saint Trinity” of every depiction in space. This seems to be no less dangerous than crossing the rivers of Lethe or Styx. How to cross the River? This is the question. And a mythic conflict can never be solved at a level of origination, beginning.... The exhibition by Anton
H. is a depiction of his painterly experience in confronting
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