Igor Bravničar

For Igor Bravničar, expressing oneself in the language of art means combining music and artistic creativity. He translates his conception of art, which he experiences in abstract form in music, his primary interest, into a visual world, where he explores philosophical concepts dealing with infinity, borders, and transitions.
The artist initially painted human figures and organic forms combined with ornaments that form a uniform image of an extrasensory reality, through which a world of imaginary privacy opens up as an abstract reflection of urban life.
Later he began creating large paintings depicting scenes from the sea and abstract landscapes that create a space of mysterious and infinite waves of repeating colour rhythms, light-dark changes, and tonal softness. He uses the expressive possibilities of large-format paintings to depict abstract seas, which he presents as a movable woven colour structure, through which he expresses his enchantment with the trembling surface of the sea suffused with diverse transitions of light. When the motifs and colour relationships are studied in detail, the painter’s well-thought-out search for borderline compositional relationships reveals itself, creating a unique artistic world by oscillating between two opposites. The seas are a metaphor for infinity and timelessness, and absence from the real world. The undulating surfaces and the sea with its reflections that merge into the horizon are the source of the artist’s inspiration even in his later works in the cycles Horizonti (Horizons) and Prehodi (Transitions)..
The details of the sea’s surface painted in layers and various textures form the basis or the original, from which fine-art print variations develop. The artist plays with various shades of colour, with which he creates colour separations that each time highlight different relationships and create a new meaning. This is a random order of patterns, which can be translated into abstraction. Works from his cycle Inverzije kroga (Circle Inversions) are based on the classical technique of oil on canvas, which turn into a referential original or a matrix for the inversions developed using a print technique on special transparencies and presented as lightboxes. Order and consistency are combined in the search for various artistic expressions developed from the original oil painting. With this procedure, the artist extends into the field of digital art, which changes the colour relationships in the lightboxes by manually resetting the LED light source.
His paintings in the series Membrane (Membranes) reveal spatially unlimited meditative landscapes transformed into mental spaces of seas, clouds, and horizons. They depict undulating surfaces that the painter physically shapes from the canvas that he applies the colour to. The ambiences created combine the past, present, and future.