IZVOR PENDE

Die Ferne Gottes

04.03.-28.03.2010.

Opening 04.03.2010., Thursday at 7 pm

Barrel Gallery
HDLU, Trg žrtava fašizma b.b. 

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Galerie Koch and thanks to support of Republic Croatia - Ministry of Culture, City of Zagreb and Face Croatia.

Per aspera ad astra

On Izvor Pende’s Work

Photography—Izvor Pende’s work emanates from photography. The artist does not use it as a sui generis artistic medium. He is not concerned with photography as an artistic image. Rather, it serves to capture impressions of reality which at the moment of their discovery strike Pende as worthy of being painted and which he aspires to translate into art. For him, photography replaces the sketchbook of the Old Masters. In a short circuit with reality, such sketches depicted the later work in its original form. Hence, the Renaissance theorist Federico Zuccaro compared the drawing with the divine act of Creation. He saw in it the first emergence of the idea for a work. In this respect, photography in the work by Pende can by all means be related to the traditional role the drawing played for painting. Only that the hand carries out modifications to the appearance of reality during the act of drawing. This occurs in accordance with the painter’s designo interiore, with the mental image of his later work, which is not possible in photography, in which the artist’s mental images initially remain in the conjunctive. They are purely optative. Izvor Pende is therefore also in no way concerned with copying his photography, as did the so-called photorealist painters. They were delighted when their paintings were taken for genuine photographs, because they utterly confused the viewer’s eyes. In contrast, Pende uses his photographic depictions of reality to assemble a fictitious world before he even picks up a brush. He pieces together collages out of different images, for instance a ship docked in the port of Hamburg with the coast of Dalmatia, and something entirely new emanates from this alliance during the act of painting. In the work entitled Coast (2009), the ship becomes a boat-shaped rock spur, and even the sea and the sky are composed of impressions from different photographs.

Painting—Izvor Pende reduces, omits, supplements, and condenses. He concentrates and essentializes in his painting. This makes the comparison of photography with painting blatantly clear. Yet this also means that for the artist, the law of mimesis, the most realistic representation possible of the real world, no longer applies—which also cannot be the case otherwise for a contemporary painter. If there is something like a normative standard for Pende, then, taking recourse to Paul Klee, it is: “Do not reproduce the visible, but make it visible.” Such a norm begins to become the guiding principle of painters when photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. Because it more accurately depicts reality than painting; it empowers painting with an entirely new freedom. The era of the grapes painted by Zeuxis, onto which, it is said, birds hungrily descended from the sky, and Apelles’ drapery is finally over. Modernity dawns, and the painter is now concerned with advancing to the heart of the grapes, tearing apart the drapes, and allowing the images behind visible reality to take shape. The mirror as a metaphor for painting is obsolete. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the contemporary painter is called on to go behind the looking glass and impart to us what he sees there. Izvor Pende’s series testify to his step behind the mirror. When he treats themes such as women or the sea in invariably new paintings, he belies the myth of both the singular as well as the ultimate picture. In Pende’s painting, the variation of what is always the same is a subtle allegory not only of the relativity of the gaze and what is seen. It also reveals that reality no longer allows itself to be accommodated in painted universals. There is not only one valid image of the world. Pende’s style of painting, in which he applies several layers of glazing, thin paint one upon the other, furnishes the formal equivalent of it. His manner of painting, as brisk as it is, has the power required to respond to an altered perception of the world and reality in an adequately supple way. Its characteristic fluid style demonstrates an enlightened presence of mind in which both the fleeting and ephemeral qualities of all phenomena are preserved.

Series—In Pende’s paintings, meticulous precision is frequently pitted against the formal briskness of his style when he develops his subjects. In this connection, one need only look at the summer house in the work of the same name from 2009—the structure of the wood and the façade glisten in various, strictly isolated shades of color. This house has also traveled a long way in order to ultimately arrive on the coast of Dalmatia in the artist’s painting. Pende became familiar with it while viewing a quarantine camp, took photographs of it, and relocated it into the melancholy, shadow- and sun-drenched summer serenity of his painting. In general, the dialectics we see here in terms of form and content account for a substantial share of the appeal of the artist’s pictures, in which he not only links different moods but different styles of painting. Whereas he subtly alters the perspective on his theme from painting to painting. The consistent variation and differentiation of one subject in different works require the emancipation of the viewer. Instead of blissful immersion, artistic work in series forces the viewer to compare the individual pictures and thus scrutinize them. Izvor Pende’s strategy is reminiscent of the famous gesture by Bertolt Brecht, who in the 1920s had a banner hung in the theater bearing the words “Don’t gape so romantically!” Brecht did not want the audience to identify emotionally with what was happening on the stage; he wanted them to penetrate it intellectually. Members of the audience were supposed to better understand themselves after the play had ended. The tua res agitur that emerges behind this, the claim that art is to be treated as a person’s concern and thus the concern of each individual viewer, is an age-old aesthetic demand. It also applies to Pende’s paintings. It lifts them out of the purely private and biographical and makes them universally binding. Pende’s pictures address us in an existential way. Their series character resembles a test arrangement. Viewing them takes one on an inward journey, making each viewer his or her own Columbus. Only instead of discovering America, we discover ourselves.

Portrait Sea—In his most recent series, Izvor repeatedly portraits a young woman and the sea. Either each subject on its own—the woman is often depicted in the interior of a house, and the sea as part of a coastal landscape—or both of them together, whereby the young woman, immersed in her view of the sea, is usually portrayed from behind. The titles of the pictures reveal that the protagonist’s name is Bubu, and that Dance is the section of the coast near Dubrovnik, the town in which Pende, who was born in Zagreb, spent the major part of his youth and where he also experienced the Balkan War. However, for all intents and purposes, these names have all but no bearing on how one views the paintings. Because Pende is less interested in the singular or the individual, and more interested in the general and the essential. His sea is not the Adriatic, even when, such as in the Lokrum series, he focuses on a specific island off the coast. Rather, the artist is eager to depict the sea’s inherent qualities as they might appear anywhere in the world we encounter the ocean. He paints it calm and waveless, domesticated by the tides like a well-behaved pet, or roaring and spuming, attacking the coast like a wild beast. The colors in which he immerses the sea, the sky, and the coast in his paintings even deny the original source of the subject. We never see coloring even remotely reminiscent of the sun-drenched Dalmatian coast. The paintings are not cheerful. They have been bathed in dismal, dark shades of blue or gray that turn them into melancholy mandalas. They are more suggestive of the North or the Baltic Sea than the Adriatic. Once again, Pende does not create his pictures out of mimesis. Reality does not serve as a mirror for his art, but rather he looks, as described above, beyond the looking glass and thus behind reality. He fictionalizes his impressions and turns them into collages. In this way, he creates a kind of essence of what he has seen and experienced in a painting. When we look at his painting, we do not lay our eyes on the world, but on the world as it has been filtered through the artist’s temperament and temperature. “L’art, c’est le monde vu par un tempérament,” as Emile Zola, the great novelist, once wrote to his friend Paul Cézanne.

Portrait Women—Thus, art gives us the world as seen through the lens of the artist’s temperament. World (“monde”) and temperament (“tempérament”), representation and modification, are the leverage that also define the depictions of women in Izvor Pende’s work. For all the high recognition value of the protagonist, her portrait is less interested in the individual than in the essential. This urge to transcend the personal portrait and achieve one that is universally valid testifies to the artist’s Platonic longing to advance to the heart of human beings and things through his paintings. The numerous portraits of the young woman named Bubu exhibit superindividual facets in much the same way as the depiction of the sea in Pende’s work. We see her slender, beautiful shape and her delicate face with loose black hair and dark, pensive eyes in various situations. The artist frequently portrays her in interiors, standing at the window and looking out, or sitting or lying on a bed in a bedroom. She wears scanty black panties and an equally as revealing undershirt. On the one hand, the way she is depicted directs the viewer’s gaze to the field of erotic reception. On the other hand, any lasciviousness is decidedly repelled due to the melancholy mood that lies over the paintings. The dominating and determining shades of blue connect the portraits with Pende’s views of the sea. The protagonist is fully immersed in herself. Her gaze never seeks out the eye of the viewer. And she is always alone in these pictures. Her appearance is less a thematization of the joys of an erotic encounter and more one of the human being’s fundamental loneliness. We are all born alone, and we will die alone. Any pain we have to endure is ours alone. An embrace, regardless of how warm, is always only temporary consolation. It is precisely this human conditio fundamantalis that is the main theme of the paintings. They turn these portraits into monuments to human forsakenness. Despite her personal contours, Bubu is transformed by the painter’s hand. For Pende, the character becomes the allegory in which the viewer finds him- or herself.

Melancholy—Taking comparative recourse to art history, in Izvor Pende’s series we notice a remarkable reversal. We need only call to mind Botticelli’s radiant beauties—Primavera, The Birth of Venus, or Pallas and the Centaur, in which mythical figures achieve such pronounced individual features that Botticelli’s contemporaries believed to recognize specific women from Florentine society. And if we look at them today, then it is hardly different. For all the ideality of their portrayal, in the first instance we believe we see the personal portraits of unmistakable women. Whereas Botticelli’s painting consummates a transformation of the universal into the individual, as we have seen, the contrary is the case for Pende. However, what they have in common is the theme of melancholy. Because Botticelli’s women, with their exaggeratedly slender limbs, have faces surrounded by ample golden hair that generally exhibit an introverted, solemn, melancholy expression. The Greek physician Hippocrates was the first to investigate the character of melancholy. For him it is one of four possible temperaments that define the nature of human beings. In his view, our temperament is dependent on the relation in which yellow and black bile, phlegm, and blood blend together in our body. If they combine in a harmonious way, we have a balanced temperament. If one of the juices dominates, this is reflected in a person’s disposition. Hippocrates traces the occurrence of melancholy to an excess of black bile in our body. It has an impact on the soul. The melancholic has a sad outlook on the world and reality. In our day and age, the American essayist Susan Sontag sees the cause of melancholy in an inherited burden on intellectuals. For her they are people born under the sign of Saturn. Their business is thinking, and that makes them sad, because it repeatedly points out their mortality. Marcel Duchamp made us aware of the fact that humans normally suppress this in his epitaph, whose ironic malice can hardly be exceeded: “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent” (Besides, it’s always others who die).

Figure from behind—The depiction of melancholy has always appealed to writers and artists. That thinking and sadness exist alongside one another is iconographically featured in the pose of the head heavily resting in the hand of, for example, Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, or the angel in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. The figure with its back turned toward us in paintings by the Romanticists, for example in works by Gustav Carus or Caspar David Friedrich, represents another form of pensive contemplation. Its view of the world takes place on our behalf. When, along with them, we look at Creation, the painters want us to see it with their eyes as a mirror of the soul. In awe over the majesty of a moonlit night, as in a painting by Carus in which the painter appears to be moved by Immanuel Kant’s insight that above him is “the starry night” and in him “the moral law.” Or moved by the sublime nature of a mighty mountain range such as the one depicted in Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Or unsettled by the infinite vastness and expanse of the sea as it is featured in his Monk by the Sea, which, upon viewing, Heinrich von Kleist once felt as if his “eyelids had been cut away.” Yet even if the latter painting involves dismay over the possibility of a world that has succumbed to disorder, the predominant feeling in the Romantic perspective of reality is the certainty of being in safe hands in a pantheistically interlaced Creation. When we look out at the sea with the figures Pende portrays from behind, with his women, this certainty is gone. The title of the series God’s Distance alludes to this in a way that cannot be ignored. But distance does not mean non-existence, but more a deus absconditus, a hidden God. Perhaps, in spite of everything, he can ultimately be discovered behind the impression of the senselessness of existence; behind the ocean’s endlessly rolling waves and the emotional and existential vicissitudes of life. In his play Caligula, while Albert Camus may describe the absurdity of the human condition with the words “men die and they are not happy,” Izvor Pende’s paintings in principle know better. Light time and again steals into them. A sophisticated dramaturgy illuminates—faintly, but pensively—the blue views of the sea and the blue room in which—along with us—his women contemplate themselves and life. Per aspera ad astra.

Michael Stoeber

Translated from the German by Rebecca van Dyck

IZVOR PENDE

1976                                    born in Zagreb, Croatia

1996-98                        Art Academy in Zagreb, Croatia

1998-2005                        Art Academy for Painting (Kunstakademie), Düsseldorf,

Germany with Prof. Rissa

2005                                     Akademiebrief der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dubrovnik

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2003                                    

Galerie Acht P!, Bonn; Germany *

2005                                    

Galerie Acht P!, Bonn, Germany *                                   

Galerie Christa Burger, Munich, Germany

2007

Galerie Koch, Hannover *

2008                                   

BAT, Campus Galerie, Bayreuth *

2009

Kunstverein Bad Kreuznach, 1.-21. March 2009

Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Trier e.V., 24. April – 24.May 2009
Kunstverein Uelzen, 7. November – 6. Dezember 2009

2010

HDLU, Zagreb *

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005            

Galerie Koch, Hannover, Perspektiven -  Junge Malerei aus Düsseldorf und Frankfurt, Isabel

 Kirschner & Izvor Pende; Cristina Herradas Martín & Amalia Theodorakopoulos *

Ikop-Mueeum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Eupen, Belgien, ikop-Art-Prize 2005 *

2009                                   

BAT, Campus Galerie, 10th Anniversary Exhibition, Bayreuth

AWARDS

2002                         Prize of the Art Academy, Düsseldorf, Germany

2005                        Nominee for the ikop-Art-Prize

COLLECTION

Gabriela Henkel, Düsseldorf