Ring Gallery

Trg žrtava fašizma bb

Boris Bućan: Portrets

April 16 - 26 April, 2009.

Exhibition opening April 16, 2009 at 7 pm.

To Reach the Moon, to Describe Bućan

Jazz is hot, it comes out of a sunflower. It is black and golden and wants to smile. Jazz is a Black man. There is a great difference between jazz and classical music, which comes out of a philodendron and is black and green by nature. As concise as Bach may be, he tends to write his studies of rhythm on a single leaf. If you ask yourselves what architecture is, you will discover that heads of architects are inscribed within cupolas. Their eyeglasses and cigarettes included. All of this is complete nonsense! One cannot write about Boris Bućan without getting stranded on two rocks. The first rock is to speak in the words of surrealism, which has been buried and forgotten long ago. The second one is to look for comparisons, something which reminds one of something else. The moon can be described only as a round and shiny celestial body which, however, borrows its light from elsewhere. To the reader of this sentence, the moon would make no sense at all. There is a story about a group of monkeys trying to catch the reflection of the moon upon the surface of a lake: they descend the tree holding one another by the tail, and the last one dips the bucket. Nothing happens! To try to describe Bućan would be equally apish. Who does he borrow from? The answer is: from dear God himself, even though Bućan is a little quicker in painting than God was in creating the world. To the sensitive observer, Bućan’s paintings are like drugs; he becomes intoxicated and desires to take them home with him. They should be exhibited in brothels, if brothels existed and if they were not so petty-bourgeois. I look at these paintings, they unfold in front of me like petals. Some of them are still a little wet. How is it possible, I wonder, that such cosmic stuff is being made at a Zagreb address? We tend to think that important things happen far away from where we are. I have never quite understood what it is that those guys at the stock market do. Some wheelin’, some dealin’ and bam!, a billion dollars. Perhaps Bućan should be compared to stockbrokers, instead of summoning the ghosts of Duchamp or late Titian. The stock market collapsed because of nonchalance, you might say. Not true. It collapsed because the stockbrokers began to lack imagination. With Bućan, as you will come to see, there can never be a recession. After the age of jazz and classical music, who knows what other transformations are about to happen or have already come into being. The images keep welling forth; they are not canvases, they are jokes. They come out of total darkness and laugh in our faces. And, as Borges would say regarding the moon, they need to be given a good look. We might never see them again.

Milana Vuković Runjić

The painter and graphic designer Boris Bućan (Zagreb, 1947) graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb in 1967. In the same year he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. He continued his education at the Academy of fine Arts in Zagreb, whence he graduated in 1972. He is the author of more than seventy one-man shows and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.