In order to create the cycle of works shown at this exhibition Tomislav Buntak started from the intimate drawings from his notebooks created some five-six years ago. He found how to represent the ideas of these drawings in a similar medium, but more attractive for the gallery exhibition. Buntak — painter of discreet intimate and poetic vocation, loyal to the art that comes from the contemplation and meditation — for the first time in his career, declaring a high level of artistic consciousness about self-sufficiency and transparency of the drawing as medium, uses acrylic pens — in golden and silver colours — to draw on grounded canvas. He enjoys the manual characteristic of his work and here the drawing — basis of his morphology — as the elementary trace made by hand has the status of autonomous and complete artistic result, without any linguistic “transgression”. Formally it allows him to enrich and make more complex the narrative structure and composition, to feel the specific new texture and while getting into the abundance of details — that was more difficult to achieve while painting — to better establish himself as meticulous, suggestive, susceptible and above all narrative draftsman.
The drawings created in balance of golden and silver colours form the interesting composition of refined, imaginative, pastoral landscapes full of poetic visions, rich narrative structures and emphasized allegoric subtext. The painter knowingly uses golden colour to create living creatures, people, animals and plants and even some tools that people use and silver to form everything else thus creating dynamic but harmonious relation between these two colors. Using only two colors Buntak also creates the spatiality of the drawing. The warmer golden imposes itself thus forming the front plan while the cooler silver colour is used to obtain the depth and generally form the second plan of the composition that is pulled into the depth where the positioning of the motif of wood, trees and branches is especially attractive. Voluminous clouds also appear very often in the background helping to create numerous variations of the landscape.
On the motif level golden colour metaphorically apostrophizes the presence of “golden people” in fantastic, idealized and Arcadian landscapes flooded with light. The initial groups are formed of three elongated and naked actors, figures of bizarre volume, with hypertrophied, long legs that symbolize their inclination to walking and conquering of great distances. They are the driving-wheels and accelerators of Buntak’s firm, transparent and foremost interesting narration and they make the transmission of his message possible. They hold the canes as metaphor of journey, but also as objects that in case of danger may serve as defensive weapon. Those who stagger may find the cane useful to help them back to their feet and continue the journey. The elongated shadows often mark the movement and the meaning of kinetics in Buntak\’s story/message.
“The golden three” are often represented on the top of the cliff, mountain or hill from where the greatness of entire landscape, the rest of the world in the valleys and scattered enclaves, is visible. Since they observe from the more comprehensive point, they can better understand the world in valleys and ravines that — so fragmented, closed and isolated — has no consciousness of itself as a whole. Existence of other enclaves can only be guessed because of the reduced communication (caused by xenophobia, competition, confrontation, contest?) and difficult information flow. These glades can also be perceived as Olympus — the mountain closest to God or truth — that could be a peculiar reinterpretation of the Christian legend of three wise men.
The enclaves are populated by naked, young, handsome, lovely, in pastoral way sensual and very fit people, brilliant with health, strength, energy and playfulness. Female figures have lost some of their sensuality and therefore are not separated from the harmonious, idealistic and idyllic world of Buntak’s Arcadia.
In ethereal, Arcadian and idyllic landscapes and completely self-sufficient and self-satisfied communities people are accompanied by horses (tamed to transfer people through space and time), dogs (faithful companions of humans since cave times), herds of other domesticated animals and birds. It seems that here is materialized the romantic ideal of human need to unite with nature, with impulsive and instinctive immediateness of life, hence the primeval life outside modern civilization. Lets not forget that many have long time ago perceived the desire for Arcadia as, in final consequence, the desire for God.
Every enclave is wonderfully ordered world in miniature, full of pulsating life, hedonism, serenity, pertness, playfulness and optimism. There is a precise hierarchy for everything — man, for instance, rides the gigantic gryphon, thus stating his inviolable supremacy; wild cats peacefully sleep in the shade because already their excessive size conveys that they are the kings of all beasts. By the shores of obviously calm and warm sea the fish is hooked, but only in just quantities, necessary for the subsistence of community. The same applies to huge squid, washed ashore — the community accepts what the nature offers for the survival.
Evaluating humans as worthy creatures, Buntak doesn’t send them to heavens, but introduces with exceptional sense for balance of composition plans the angels, creatures that fight the forces of gravitation.
There are often fantastic, enormous and bizarre looking bastard creatures in these drawings. The immensity of their physique, the strength that they emanate and their bulky proportions formally strike amazing note to the composition of drawings, but at the same time they contrast the peacefulness of other living creatures within the environment. These huge creatures, often materialized as great birds, seem numb and drowsy in this Arcadian world, as if they disclaim their own supremacy. Their clumsiness emanates the lack of danger and they may even be tamed and instrumentalized for human needs. The enclaves where Buntak places parts of his story/message — every single one with its own singularity — make the whole visible world heterogeneous and variegated.
“The golden three” travel and meet other people and animals and Buntak\’s composition is often enriched with the third element — newcomers, groups of people from some even more remote enclave. Sometimes characteristically — often within the same composition — appears the figure who, as St. Christopher, carries a child on his back.
The environment populated by the people that the three actors meet on their quest is intact and still have its undisturbed Arcadian quality. However, in wider human environment, it seems as there was a cataclysm that separated people who, scattered through enclaves, inhabit this Arcadia, thus temporarily interrupting the global harmony. Maybe Buntak’s drawings announce that people should, because of burning and pressing anthropological issues, turn to their own destiny, which also implies the intensive and serious communication. The three “golden” actors, hence, in every community they visit on their quest suggest the communication with the newcomers and draw attention to the fact that world is only a mosaic of enclaves. They are trying to inspire the need to travel, to know the world, to meet the people and other creatures, to discover the advantages of connecting with others and to learn about the sense of contiguity in order to re-establish the real humanity and harmony that would fulfill their lives.
It seems that “the golden three” also suggest that communication represents the possibility to reach the higher level of humanity which should contribute to emotional fulfillment, wholesome realization of subject, the pleasure of being alive, and, pathetically said, happiness as the most important component of life that makes life bearable and acceptable. It seems that in this way Buntak’s story assumes the religious dimensions.
This is why the three long-legged men correspond to our idea of three wise men who bravely fulfill their crucial mission, their holy task to fit the world into a harmonious mosaic. These “golden men” live in everybody and therefore are possible and above all necessary even in our times.
Certain acquirements of eclectic postmodern can be observed in Buntak’s cycle. On semantic level it is the inspiration with “required reading”, ancient (classical, eschatological, historical, mythological, symbolic, moralistic, religious, Christian) stories and used literary models. Today, in moments of still present and dangerous crisis in art, there is the more stressed and present awareness that in painting everything is already said, that all the paintings are already painted and all plastic possibilities exhausted long time ago. Therefore the idea of painting as a screen for mimetic, manneristic and eclectic projection of narrative fragments is already abandoned.
The artists from all media and genres known to history of art only retell already told stories. All the stories are, therefore, told long ago, they are inveterate and generally accepted and sacrosanct beyond questioning. Buntak was, from his artistic beginnings, quite clear about the fact that there is no artistic story beyond and outside existing context and that affiliation to particular historic discourse is unavoidable for every artistic choice. Eventually, however, it results in repeated announcements — like for instance Argan’s — about death of not only painting, but art in general. Buntak a priori agrees with the fact that his narrative belongs to the conglomerate of already existing stories on the same subject and he doesn\’t insist either on presentation of some new variance of already told stories or imperative creation of some until now missing discovery.
Another fact that binds Buntak’s drawings to postmodern eclecticism is closeness of his artistic consciousness to global disappearance of Utopian faith in subversive role of art and its predetermination to essentially recreate physical and spiritual environment, to change the existing and create a better world. Today every artistic aspiration — especially in our environment — to introduce any change in the existing, wider and tighter social framework will be perceived as positively naive because completely unfeasible in reality. Namely, in every society the artists represent the minority, separated from the world of living practice, isolated in the world of its own obsessions and above all excluded from the process of community decision-making.
He told maybe the thousand years old story and he coordinated the approach and his own ambitions with the traditional character of the story. As in Buntak’s case, painters, unable to establish a new idealistic-Utopian project, deserve the alibi for retelling because of the sincere energetic charge embodied in their expression, register of personal traces and points of view, namely because of the embodied ductus.
Buntak’s story, created from the subjective restlessness and unique artistic sensibility, finds its alibi mostly in right “timing”. It comes at right time, when the spiritual crisis of barely vanished fin de siecle has intensely continued if not intensified in new millennium, in times of religious and ideological indifference, without any sincere cardinal leading thought, in times of disturbed values, corruption, infamy, precipitating humanity and communication, in today conflict world shattered and crumbled into tiny, anxious particles and in general crisis of the times we are living. His story about harmony in human environment is not even close to harmony in his own environment. The need to establish the new spirituality among people that he asserts with minute and attractive drawings is actual in today critical stage of human civilization and in recent epoch-making crisis.
There will be many recipients who will — for themselves — in Buntak’s Arcadian landscapes recognize the fact that the art can become a substitute for reality, better to say a parallel reality, a deeply personal strategy of spiritual existence and survival.
The similar artistic motivation, but with greater implacability with the present state in contemporary art, can also be perceived on the linguistic, media, operative and expressive plan. Although, of course, he doesn\’t need a solicitor or mediator in the form of art critic, we can emphasize that Buntak, as conscious artist, knows that the principle of “linguistic Darwinism” as metaphor for continuous movement of plastic arts towards innovation at any price is not efficacious for a long time now (ever since the second half of the past century). On the contrary, since then — especially since all experimental stages and escapades have exhausted themselves in the ’60s and ’70s — no solution, including the media, is neither preferentially new nor disused.
Hence, in spite it has been declared that contemporary painting is only wriggling inside itself as a closed, auto-referential and auto-reflexive system, Buntak, it seems, claims that as an artist he can still express himself spontaneously, directly, suggestively and with still relevant messages, without formal radicalism, but only manually, with mere hatching and drawing, with this oldest, most durable, most traditional and archaic medium, with lines that flow, fold and unite into a narrative figurative composition.
On the formal level there are other significant inspirations and references to historic occurrences in painting, scenography and dramaturgy as well as other solutions, generating from classic and recent comics, films of almost all genres and periods and subculture in general. But above all there are references to numerous painters of classic landscape painting from different and distant styles, first of all those who painted pastoral landscapes. These drawings will therefore stimulate the erudite recipient to note similar experiences from earlier painting occurrences contained within them.
These obvious inspirations are particularly noticeable in formal and composition solutions as relationships between figures and landscapes, and exploring of spatial plans. This refers especially to the illusion of depth (even when it is about the play of shades of woods that trace and suggest the constant and unstoppable widening of space in depth and width, in a different milieu) and illusion of three-dimensional space by which Buntak boldly restores the classic regularity of perspective. It seems that on the imaginative plan he desires that Arcadian space potentially spreads into infinity.
These drawings, obviously loyal to draftsmanship, métier in general and light, equally owe a lot to former plays of light and shade known in art history, from Masaccio and Piero della Francesca (masters who have been the first in visual arts to conceive the importance and possibilities of use and fruitful treatment of light and shade), from Correggio and Vermeer to modern masters. The light always reflects differently on the landscapes where fragments of Buntak’s story are placed. Therefore the drawings have different aspects under different lighting, ranging from almost invisible outlines to complete transparency. Some parts of the drawings are well defined and clear only if observed from particular angles. The optical effects are also intriguing: from certain angles the white background becomes darker because of the reflection of golden and silver surfaces and the whole drawing seems to be created in negative.
Buntak’s story is perceived as an attempt (coordinated with the conception of formerly described destiny and position of plastic arts in time and world we are living) to declare and establish his own sensibility, poetic quality and point of view in suggestive, honest and morphologically communicative way, but also to take his ethic and aesthetic stand, regardless of (un)purposefulness and utility of this practice. His only artistic imperative is to make the best and most out of what he himself is.
Ivica Župan
