VRNITEV

Igor Bravničar, a Slovenian academic painter and pianist, has been co-creating the Slovenian artistic space for more than two decades with works that intertwine music and visual arts. His creative process is marked by the discovery of ways of translating art, which he experiences in abstract form in music and which represents his primary study, into the visual world of canvas and brush, where he explores philosophical concepts and expresses his own experience of physical phenomena. The notions of infinity, boundaries and horizons and the transitions between them play an important role in this, creating spaces of mystery and boundlessness of waves of recurring colour rhythms, light-dark transitions and tonal softness.

With a conceptual structuration rooted in the nature of musical composition, his works define the unrestricted freedom of the empty ground, which thus becomes a balanced space for reflection and inner impressions of the artist's world. He repeatedly finds inspiration for his work in seascapes, the trembling surface of the sea and the play of light gradients that characterise both his series of abstract works and those more figurative images, the paintings from the sea, shown in his latest exhibition, Return.

It is a selection of large-format works that Bravničar has created in recent years and represents a continuation of the development of the artist's expression through the same motif, the sea, in which he has moved from abstract horizons and membranes to more realistic depictions of seascapes, sometimes taken from the immediate and sometimes from fantasy reality.The works are a continuation of the artist's development through the same motif, the sea, in which he has moved from abstract horizons and membranes to a more realistic depiction of seascapes, sometimes taken from the immediate and other times from a fantastical reality. All of the paintings on display share a figurativeness that can be understood as a return to the artist's creative beginnings, when he was mostly devoted to painting figures and organic forms, interwoven with ornaments, which he used to connect the elements into unified images of a supersensible reality.

Despite the partially limited, closed form of figuration, marked by relativity and technique, the exhibition represents his return to the freedom of creation, which is no longer defined by predefined guidelines and clearly defined notions, as was typical of his previous work, but allows each work to express itself independently, independently of the other works on display, and in this way tells its own story, a unique and fleeting experience of a lived moment.

The works in ink, oil and acrylic are painted on various substrates, from cerada and jute to classical canvas, creating textural starting points that the artist incorporates as elements of his own impression. In the creation of the final work of art, both the colours, with their chosen hues, and the gaps between them play an important role, thus drawing attention to the duality of character and substrate, the duality of understanding, and the dual nature of the world and of all experience.

In the ambiences created, past, present and future are brought together, thus the exhibition transcends the limitations of time and invites the viewer to surrender to the imaginative privacy of the artist and the world of free image.