Mediterranean in a Thousand Variations

Throughout his painting career, Igor Rončević has presented himself to the public as a subtle explorer of color and rhythms.

Each of his exhibitions is an experience, as he is an author who is consistent in his artistic research process on one hand, and on the other hand, he lives his contemporaneity through constant innovations. Regarding what he has created in the last few years, about the paintings that are a special whole on every wall, he simply states that there is not much text in these works. Only colors live in countless variations and shades. A part of the current production is shown to us by the painter at his latest exhibition ‘Letoh/hotel’ set up in the Zrinski Gallery in the space of the Zagreb Palace Hotel, a new exhibition space that is just being revealed to the public as an exhibition attraction.

Life of Colors Each new canvas is a challenge: from the base, the ‘ground’ that the painter likes to process himself in a large format, to counting almost regular square grids of painting fields. The large formats before us reveal a painter who is not afraid of exploration, shifts, and surges, an author who experiments and delights in each new work. Although the stroke and trace of the brush can be controlled in part of the creative ecstasy, entirely new horizons open up when color spills in uncontrolled playfulness of free forms and a stain is stopped. In the background of blazing red verticals, contrasting abstract spots freely spill, evoking playful Matisse’s red tones.

According to the artist’s choice Warm and cool, dynamic and mesh-like. Rhythmic. At one point, the blueness of the whipped wide strokes of visible texture will attract attention, an association with ultramarine sea and the constant changes of waves. In the great blueness, impulsive blues of the sea are experienced, a recollection of the vibration of waves and the optics of constant change of light that ripples in the shallows into new coloristic sensations. On one wall, there is a horizontal frieze made of wide elemental strokes, somewhat muted tones. Here, a special relationship to color, to the painter’s handwriting, and its rhythmic changes is also visible.
Rarely is that color so pure squeezed from the tube and laid on the canvas; more often, it is mixed with others with special attention so that countless tones and their variations finally dry on the base. All paintings have been taken from the studio according to the artist’s choice. It is evident, therefore, what the artist himself wanted to show, without special suggestions from others. And what his former student is doing today was checked in the Zrinski Gallery by the esteemed painting veteran Šime Perić, Rončević’s 93-year-old professor from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.