Zlatko Keser / A Horizon of Melancholy

The Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (15.6.-21.7.2011.)

Opening hours: every day except Sundays and bank holidays 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

The prestigious prize of the 4th Croatian Drawings Triennial was awarded to Zlatko Keser, Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, painter and master of print, long-time professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, master of drawing, and one of the strongest artistic personalities of our time, since he responded to the concept of the Triennial in the most exquisite manner. According to the postulates of the Triennial, Keser’s drawing is at the same time a trail and a contour and a border and a sign and a thought and a message and a letter; it is a drawing that questions its own idea and sensuality. This is a drawing that dazes and infuses, entangles us, and draws us into tangles of darkness and vortexes of uneasiness. It has been created in a state of ecstasy that exercises force not only on the hand, but also on the heart, the soul and all the spiritual potentials. This dictation by the state of consciousness does not stop until the fulfilment is complete. It may be followed through an uninterrupted course of thin and thick network of lines, which interweave and thread through narrow passages, wide areas, and finally vast spaces of imagination. They become condensed within dark tangles that – like a black mist – hover and radiate in the abyss of the universe.

The exhibition offers a selection from several cycles created in the last two decades. Its specific feature lies in the counterpoint of big and small formats, and in scaling from the colouristic horror vacui compositions to thick black areas, culminating in the cycle entitled A Horizon of Melancholy. The author created these artworks of tactile value, ivory smoothness and expressed sensuality in an act of intimacy, in caress, on the edge of lascivity, in the longing for a flash of darkness.

From the text by Slavica Marković, MA.

Though the “daily” dimension of Keser’s painting occasionally shows structures in a fortunate harmony, a well-balanced tangle of tiny veins and threads, and an unusual beauty of lines and matter (the Breton-like “feverish” beauty, of course), it can almost always be sensed that he possesses a latent “nocturnal” bone, that behind the achieved dynamic equilibrium, there is always a temptation lurking in the wings, threatening to destroy, erode, reject the already achieved (as inadequate). The point here is not the Penelope-like complex of prolonged waiting (“to pass the time”), but rather masculine bravery in confronting the sinister side of existence, and the awareness of the fact that behind many layers of vision and illusion, there still remains a layer of the out of sight and the out of reach. Two parallel motivations are evidently struggling inside Zlatko Keser’s very being: on the one hand, the tendency toward forming and the capability of shaping, and on the other, the drive toward destruction and the need for the denial absolutism to become a permanent corrective to conformist relativism. Though it is obvious that parallel motivations may, in principle, meet only in eternity, the miracle of the act of creation makes occasionally room for the figurative power of painting to meet – with a productive result – the iconoclasm of ethical uneasiness, the destructive power of frustration connected with aesthetic potentials and accomplishments.

From the text by Tonko Maroević, Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.