The exhibition by Pula-based artist Bojan Šumonja, for whom this marks his second solo presentation in Split, encompasses a decade of active painting practice. Across four exhibition sections, Split audiences will have the opportunity to explore several distinct trajectories in the artist’s visual research, which together form a wonderfully layered compendium of elements drawn from the realms of both the real and the fantastical, intriguing in its multiplicity of allusions and the manifold possibilities it offers for visual interpretation.
Bojan Šumonja’s painted body of work stands out as one of the more fascinating marriages of a highly individual formal expression and symbolic imagery. Since the latter half of the 1980s, he has been producing paintings of remarkable density, their titles and conception hinting at the wealth of cultural codes inscribed within them. At first glance, one might suppose that knowing those codes is a prerequisite for fully understanding the work, yet this is only true if we reduce a painting to its message or meaning alone. It is, rather, the technique through which the work speaks to us that draws us in and compels us to go in search of that meaning. Šumonja’s work draws on an exceptionally rich catalogue of European culture and art, including such luminaries as Masaccio, Holbein, Velázquez, Ingres, Goya, Blake, Manet, Picasso, Anselm Kiefer and Jörg Immendorff, among many others. Rather than dwelling on any single influence, he touches on each of them lightly, quoting them in his own distinctive way, and with considerable boldness and skill brings the classical tradition into dialogue with pop culture, the visual language of comics, photography and film, all of it bound together by a neo-expressionist aesthetic and an understated but persistent social criticism.
What strikes one most immediately upon encountering Šumonja’s paintings is the ease and evident mastery with which he handles pictorial composition. Each work is deftly balanced in the complex interplay of its formal components. A considerable achievement in itself, given that the bulk of his paintings are executed on a large format, which demands extended periods at the canvas and makes it far more difficult to hold on to the same feeling, sustain the initial impulse and maintain an equal degree of creative intensity throughout. Particularly characteristic of his work are an unconventional approach to framing, striking compositional cuts, and unexpected solutions in terms of colour and light. There is a lush colourist sensibility to his painting, underpinned by a keen feeling for the sumptuousness of painterly substance, for the vitality and weight of applied paint, and for the expressive power of surface texture. Each canvas bears clear witness to a process of sustained, rigorous and multilayered working. A dense and generous palette weaves its motifs through innumerable encounters of brush and canvas, built up in thick impasto that evokes something almost sculptural, a relief-like painterly armature spread across the surface. His highly personal palette is forged somewhere at the outer limits of the possible, its colours holding the eye through the interaction between contradictory elements. It is precisely the spectrum of colours rarely encountered in everyday life (vivid pinks, blues, greens and yellows) that constitutes the artist’s forte in conjuring the dystopian atmosphere that pervades his paintings. Whether chromatically heightened or near-monochromatic, right through to his phase of grey-blue canvases, they almost invariably feature a pronounced drawing. Yet even the monochromatic works breathe a muted polyphony of colour, a suggested fragrance, a quality of “astral sound”, and above all a luminous, radiant luminescence. Everything springs from the world that surrounds us, everything stands in some relation to it and to our experience of it, a combination of attempts to understand, interpret and paint the world around us. Herein lies the source of his remarkable breadth of interpretation, a world that one moment erupts in a blaze of colouristic fireworks display, and the next retreats veiled in grey. However austere certain works may appear, however muted their palette, colour remains fundamental, wholly at the service of the work and inextricable from it. Colour, moreover, seems to carry “a kind of memory”, it conveys emotion and governs the prevailing atmosphere of the canvas. Šumonja’s paintings are open-ended, rich with meaning and association, inviting each viewer to draw their own conclusions.
Bojan Šumonja (1960, Pula) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in Italy. His works are held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria in Pula, the Rovinj Heritage Museum, the Coastal Galleries in Piran, and many other public and private collections. He has exhibited in more than two hundred group shows and around a hundred solo exhibitions. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his artistic work, among them the Grand Prix at the 7th Biennial of Painting of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU) in Zagreb. A monograph on his work, with a text by Igor Zidić, was published in 2007 by HDLU Istria. He is the co-founder and artistic director of the Poola Gallery in Pula, and a member of the informal artist collective One Dollar Bill, alongside Marko Jakše and Pierre Toll. He lives and works in Pula.