Gallery Ring

Trg žrtava fašizma bb

Davor Krelja / Paintings 1988 - 2008

24. 3. -15. 4. 2009

Exhibition opening: 24 March, 2009 at 8 pm

Morphology of Davor Krelja’s work is formally disparate and it includes two characteristic heterogeneous iconographies. The first, thanks to the concentrate reduction of scene to its most elemental expression, is closer to the reduction and geometric abstraction, where it is all about rejection of any disposition offered by the genre of narrative, figurative painting, where the quaintness of painting and aesthetic egotism are by-passed. The initial phase of Krelja’s work, hence, affirms the awareness of painting as a physical object, structured and built according to its special and distinct rules of production and reception. Here the immanent validity of painting as distinctive medium is continued as well as the questioning of potential of certain contents attributive exclusively to the painting and not the reality, thus binding Krelja’s painting to the analytic-rational tradition of the milieu in which he has been formed.

The other, more recent part of his work’s morphology is dedicated to the return to expressive, figurative, objective representation. Melancholic and contemplative by its nature, this iconography manifests the artist’s intimate world, a more sensitive and lyric side of his nature and maintains the tension between associations, allusions and symbolic offset.

The additional characteristic of Krelja’s endeavours is regular and often cynical confrontation with painting trends that he has witnessed hitherto.

Krelja’s paintings are naturally ambiguous and ironically sensitive at the same time, they are always a somewhat mocking commentary about the subject of a particular cycle. They are often some sort of excursion (a deviancy/deliberate departure from the imagined trough of the “true course”). Now, for instance, it is obvious that the geometric abstraction with which he was preoccupied at the beginning of his career did not interest him in its declarative sense, but as a deviation, shift or deflection while he chose geometry as instrument of expression with which he would be able to put even stronger stress on this breakthrough.

Decoding Krelja’s oeuvre and its visual and expressive, perceptible and semantic constituent elements through two decades of artistic work means revealing a vital and dynamic artistic concept and continuity as well as detecting powerful and radical changes in which, however, a developmental logic is immanent. It is recognised as a rich, coherent and meaningful whole in which, over the years, firm referential points have been fixed thus endorsing the artist’s creative integrity.

This exhibition documents the riches of Krelja’s poetic vision, variety of his idiom and his wide visual acumen. He never absconds from the seductive allure of painting and the profusion of colour. His vision recognises the traditional culture of plasticity and establishes an accomplished hand.

Although Krelja is a child of postmodernism, his painting is not carried out as a “recapitulation of history” nor it draws from the “great mine” of various traditions, but always on his personal constructive principle.

Krelja’s painting cycles manifest how his oeuvre carries a special stamp of artistic nomadism, constant artistic motion regardless the formal constants achieved within itself and much less some of the generally recognised international characteristics of style.

Although he had started working just before and intensified his efforts during the crisis that brought agitation and peril to his environment, Krelja’s opus has always refused to manifest – neither in declarative, explicit nor narrative, describing manner – even the slightest sign of crisis or catastrophe, always acting as if having reached the absolute freedom and autonomy. However, the crisis can be discerned in immanent, implicit, inner, intrinsic manners, formal principles and allegoric meanings, especially in certain melancholy, with usual consequences of critical periods of history: doubt, tension, conflict and above all antagonism to everything unambiguous. 

Krelja does not create according to the expectations or market demands, he has never looked up at any direct role model and he has never let the national or any other tradition to restrain his work. 

Ivica Župan