Repetition and Reiteration, Josip Rončević’s most recent painting cycle, takes as its point of departure a deceptively simple question: what happens when a painting becomes its own source material? This question engages with the fundamental concerns of painting: the relationship between image and template, original and copy, abstraction and representation, process and finished work. When a painting no longer departs from an external motif but from itself, the traditional logic of representation turns inward. The painting becomes its own origin, its own subject of observation, and its own problem.
The cycle’s title establishes the very same logic. Repetition and reiteration are near-synonymous words, yet they do not coincide entirely; a slight shift remains between them, a difference concealed within apparent sameness. This same relationship is then carried over onto the painted surface. Rončević constructs horizontally oriented paintings composed of two connected halves, each produced in sequence after the other. The central vertical line divides the surface into two equal halves, whilst simultaneously establishing two points of origin within the same painting. The first half is made freehand, through gesture, rhythm, and decisions that take shape in the very act of painting. The second derives from the already painted half, which now becomes the template for its own repetition.
This is the moment at which a decisive reversal takes place. That which began as free and abstract now becomes subject to observation, measurement, and transfer. The abstract painting starts to function almost as a figurative motif, one nonetheless derived entirely from its own structure. This opens up a conceptual questioning of mimesis: painting no longer imitates reality but strives to repeat its own trace. The painting remains a painting whilst simultaneously becoming the template for a painting. The copy, in this context, is not a mechanical reproduction of an original but a re-enactment of a procedure, and the difference that inevitably arises is not an error but an inescapable trace of the painterly act itself.
Rončević does not resolve this problem by means of photography, digital transfer, or any other form of technical reproduction, but through classical painterly means. The second half comes into being through looking, through the gauging of relationships, and through the transference of gesture, nuance, and compositional rhythm. What academic painting training typically exercises through the copying of models, nature, or the works of the old masters is here redirected towards the artist himself. The painter becomes at once his own source material and his own copyist. It is in this that an anti-academic reversal emerges: the academic method preserves its precision, yet is brought to bear upon a free abstract surface. The task is to produce the same, whilst knowing that the same cannot be fully retrieved.
Despite the studiousness of the procedure, the work retains a sense of humour and lightness. Recipes, dates, and an almost production-like logic of process stand in contrast to forms that feel immediate, soft, and handwritten, executed in the artist’s characteristically broad and open palette. The system is rigorous, yet the forms continually elude it, and the perfect replica remains impossible. What persists behind the method is the visible trace of the hand, along with time, fatigue, and circumstances that can never be fully anticipated or controlled. It is precisely this tension between strict procedure and the impossibility of fully mastering one’s own trace that saves the work from cold conceptualism.
Visually, the cycle is built upon a tension between the simplicity of the mark and the complexity of the painted surface. The compositions are often reduced to a handful of lines, coloured fields, and floating forms, yet their clarity is continually unsettled by the flickering of the brushstroke, the porosity of the ground, uneven edges, and subtle variations in tone. The brushstroke retains the character of handwriting, a calligraphic trace, or an improvised note. The forms move between abstract sign and possible motif: at times they call to mind a letter, an animal, a fragment of landscape, or an object, yet they never fully settle into a single meaning.
The open palette softens the conceptual strictness of the procedure still further. Colour is not a neutral filling of the surface but an active vehicle of difference: in nuance, in the density of the application, in transition, in tonal intensity, and in the manner in which the surface receives the paint, it becomes clear that repetition never takes place as pure duplication. The pictorial character of the cycle therefore lies not solely in the composition of two halves, but in the small shifts through which the same form each time re-materialises as something slightly different.
Repetition and Reiteration is therefore not simply a series concerned with reproducing images, but a body of work that uses the act of repetition to question the very nature of representation. Rončević takes up one of the central tenets of Conceptual Art – that idea, process, and system can underpin a work of art – yet realises this not by abandoning painting, but by pursuing it with rigorous commitment. These are not illustrations of an idea rendered in paint, but painting proper, work that conducts conceptual thinking through its own materiality, process and touch. The image is not repeated in hopes of returning it unchanged; rather, repetition exposes how the image shifts with every iteration. In that small, insistent gap between procedure and gesture, between sameness and reiteration, a space of meaning takes shape.
Jelena Šimundić Bendić
Josip Rončević was born in 1991 in Zadar, where he completed his secondary education. In 2015 he graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts in Zagreb, and in the same year enrolled in the painting department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he graduated in 2020 with the distinction of summa cum laude. He has shown work in ten solo and some thirty group exhibitions, among the most notable of which are the Radoslav Putar Award Final 2023 (Salon Galić, Split), Y-Z: Construction Site of a New Generation (Octagon NMMU, Zagreb), and the 35th Youth Salon (HDLU, Zagreb), where he was a joint winner of the “Iva Vraneković – Vladimir Dodig Trokut, Artist to Artist” Award. He is the recipient of the MSU Young Artists Award ‘Ivan Kožarić’ for 2025. He is a member of HZSU, HDLU and HULU – Split.