Crayon silence
Various Gods existed during the ancient Greeks, but there was no god of the art of painting. But still the art of painting and sculpting which we admire even today was created exactly in the great mythical city of Athens. There was a series of painters who were praised by Aristotle and later on from different roman scribes. For Zeuxis Pliny the Elder emphasizes, among else, that he was a master of light and shadow, and as well impeccable in imitation of mimesis. According to the legend birds came to eat grapes from his fresco and it is well known that Zeuxis made paintings, so called monochromes, created in hue of one color.
Since long the art of painting abandoned the solemn idea of reproducing the outer world, but as it appears the world is so alluring many painters occupy themselves with it even to this day. Our western absurd without the skies and beauties has been depleted as a form of verification, but the world is not yet depleted of themes and emotions. Precisely this traditional hint of observation and dedication of the outer world gave rise to the genuine painting style of Dražen Eisenbeisser, Koprivnica born, admirer of the town of his childhood and being. His art of painting may be described as a lonesome walk with a piece of chalk and paper in hand.
In the transition from light to shadow in blush chalk, sporadically shading to the mysterious depths, in which resides the unknown life of people and animals, birds, are spans in which the sensuality of his painters soul takes residence and records. With every line where light begins and shadow ends, almost translucent, clear in its trembling obscurity, lost in the precision of perspective, uninhabited, void. The town is remembered as a peeled of facade of a beauty – a palace, as a ruinous roof over abandoned walls, a disappearing twilight of shape. They are present, but the premonition of their worn-out state and decay or the restored and newly bolstered facades, church towers, always remain melancholically facing towards the past which never disappears, recorded in the palimpsest of their endurance.
Chalk is a soft earthy painters equipment, suitable for a disciplined hand which seeks possibilities of the ethereally and the dense in clusters, that carries a wistful power, permits vanishings and appearances of «random» lines, or those ruler drawn, in this by no means diminishing a romanticism vision of a terrace or a sidewalk. The painter masterfully combines two styles: the straight surface with clear lines and the wonderful disarrangement in the brushes, tree crowns, nails in fencings, grass overgrown yards. He never stays visually or emotionally impassive and the illuminations graduate from the darkness to glaring lights. The painter obviously enjoys the lonely observations and completely still and artistically marks the iconic beauty of the decaying.
Artistically set in the monochromatic, not leaning towards the modern painting experiments, becomes the chronicler of contemporary Koprivnica. The painting functions as a baroque notation not only of the realism grandeur of man, but as well of the transcendent, without which we could not realize art. This idealistic immanence, regardless the topic, is the integral element of every good artistic creation. The sketches of the great baroque painters and the later rococo style, painted in chalk and pastel, have inadvertently found a successor in the painter Eisenbeisser, for he himself even before creating a piece, already includes the fidelity, the cognition, the expressions, the voice of the mind, the heart and the hand. If we would summarize what is important as a spiritual staple, with Eisenbeisser it is the poeticism in space and time.
Even the names toy with these terms: PASSAGE OF TIME. If we would search for literary equivalents, we could semantically find it in the dreariness of Janko Leskovar or Nikola Šop.
In painters circles it would be the frozen paintings by Jordan or the silence and uninhabited by Vaništa, as well as De Chirico’s secrets of time and space.
In these drawings Koprivnica remains recorded with a hand and the heart of a poet.
Nevenka Nekić