Formally, Zdravko Pal’s every painting is flat and two-dimensional space. Its background is treated as a complete surface of the intervention, as a field of total action where Pal through his spontaneous, instinctive, hedonistic and violent painting escapades explores the formal characteristics of the painting. The problems of spatial organization of a painting are examined here, like the relation between the first and the second, always opened, plan. It seems that Pal is concretely interested in how much the background as a completed painting can endure, that is, how many plastic, symbolic and color elements is possible to fill into the background according to his own sense of measure, present mood and a game of chance. It seems as he wants to fathom when the content is going to reach the overfilled state in which the symbols are going to prevail — in semantics and aesthetics — over the background. Of course, he is also interested in the relations between surface and blur, substance and symbol as well as the general atmosphere of a painting and the intriguing relation between chromatics and lineament…
The key role in Pal’s proceeding is dedicated to the color and the manner in which it is treated within the space of painting, that is, how the painter’s accumulated energy is discharged. The space of Pal’s painting is created by the geometric division of painting surfaces into two or three differently colored horizontal or perpendicular monochromatic surfaces over which he later puts another monochromatic layer. Thus obtained substantial layers are subsequently crushed and softened by the aggressive scraping with a broad spatula until they are disarrayed into the unstable bichromatic structures and brilliant and unexpected polychromatic effects and pictorial events. Thus he creates textures that plastically spread over the painting surface dynamizing it with a throbbing rhythm. On the paintings whose spatial organization is formed by the perpendicular lines, this disarray and entropy of structure are visibly reduced, mainly in the lower part of the paintings. In any case — although Pal hasn’t still completed his task in solving of this problem — the second plan of the painting, that throbbing background is a sensitive membrane that first absorbs and than emanates the painter’s sensibility and his unique painting energy.
Already the principles of Transavantgarde, established in the late ‘70s of the last century, in painting consciously skirted the demand for homogeneity of semantic factors and coordination of the elements of painting. In the manner deeply rooted in the postmodern emancipation from all rules known to the 20th century painting, Pal is presently guided by the sense that he has no other choice but to try to realize his own painting identity. It is thus possible that his own manner can be constructed by the number of disparate fragments that may or may not forge into a defined conceptual whole. Consequently Pal, as a painter, enjoys the incoherent, heterogeneous and disparate elements; the uncoordinated relations between the symbols within the painting space. He doesn’t restrain himself from combining various disparate fragments, elements and details. In his performing procedure he also benefits from the outcomes of accidental decisions, improvisations and even automation. It all indicates that his painting trusts to the absolutely subjective choices that are not obstructed by any preconception.
In the same manner — by the application of contents to the sensitive second plan of the painting — Pal was liberated from semantic commitments as well as narrative and literary, imaginary and fictitious, metaphoric and symbolic references… He is, as it was already stated, an impulsive and exuberant painter who uses luscious substances of color and vehement and mobile gestures. But, although he persistently avoids symbolic, he was never liberated from the psychological references. Namely, Pal regularly applies spontaneous entries on the bichromatic surface. First he works on the thick texture, using the spatula with wide and strong gestures that are difficult to fathom. Then, mostly in the middle section of the painting surface, he adds arbitrary and strange symbols; fragile, but heaving lines of high chromatic frequencies; vibrant and trembling lines of paint squeezed directly from a tube or applied with a stick. It could be said that he is adding an enigmatic graphics; hermetic, illegible drawings that dictionary of symbols doesn’t contain and that don’t have historic or known metaphoric, symbolic or literary value.
The decoding of thus set iconographic enigma is left to the receiver. These impulsive and expressive entries and graphics — as fragments of an individual and subjective experience of the world — can witness to the artist’s different spiritual and psychological states or reveal the inner spaces of his personality (for instance, a conflict energy owned more or less by almost every artist). We fathom those as entries of the painter’s psycho-motoric energy; like throbbing pictograms and psychograms of some of his inner states; like Pal’s need to express the neurotic and frenetic present times and geographic spaces where he practices. The anxiety and psychosis that we can see on these paintings are in no way strange moods — an artist is always the most sensitive and anxious individual, the most honest and eloquent seismograph for everything that the social organism feels in the always more unacceptable present-day world.
These constitutional elements are the dynamic plans of the painting that dynamize, vitalize and, above all, enrich the background with color while there are no polemics between the front and the back plan of the painting. Most importantly, on such a configuration of painting Pal’s artistic temperament is impressively realized through the touching attempt to reevaluate manual ability in painting. Here symbols and gestures — in fact, exchange of virile and explosive gesture and ailing, fragile and impulsive transparent layers of color; refined painting substance and intimately sensitive and sensual tissues — create the personality of truly talented and authentic colorist. His painting really witnesses the famous “pleasure of painting” and it establishes him as a thoroughbred painter with a secure artistic future.
Pal’s painting doesn’t explicitly examine the sense of the painting in our times, but implicitly — with his energy, hedonism, playfulness, colorist splendour, Eros, refinement, élan, optimism and evident and certain pleasure in the very act of painting — he shows not only that there’s no need for such an examination but also that there’s no need for a painter to ponder over the future of painting as a traditional discipline.
Ivica Župan
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Zdravko Pal was born on October 11, 1976 in Virovitica. In 2002 he graduated painting from the class of Professor Igor Rončević at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 2001 he participated at the students’exhibition in Galić Salon in Split. In 2001 and 2002 he participated at the manifestation The Passion Heritage and at the exhibition of ten young painters from Zagreb that was held in Hajdarović Gallery in Požega. In 2002 he participated at the 16th Triennial of Croatian Painting – Blue Salon in Zadar.
