Press
Dubrovnik tourist bulletin article
http://www.tzdubrovnik.hr/BULLENbulletinclanak.shtml?clanak=1223
Vjesnik newspaper (in Croatian)
http://www.vjesnik.hr/pdf/2005/08/25/44A44.PDF”
From Klarisa gallery exhibition brochure, 2005
COLOUR PAINTER OF THE SOUTH
Painting of the young artist Tonko Smokvina, who presents himself to the public for the first time with his independent exhibition in gallery Klarisa, in his native town, derives from the best tradition of Dubrovnik’s colour paintings. It is a unique confirmation of the artist’s memory of this place, which, bathed in intense southern light, always gives way to new creative interpretations of the strong southern colours. Just as he has been predestined by the southern climate, he has also been marked by the genetic code of his family, continuing the painting practice of his distant relative Mato Celesting Medović. Also important are his teachers Josip Trotsman (educated in Dubrovnik) and Eugen Kokot, in whose class he graduated at the Academy of Arts in Zagreb. They made stronger Smokvina’s interior creative instincts. He thus began his own passionate painting adventure, without falling into the eclectic snares, and experimenting in the quest of his own artistic expression. Tonko Smokvina is a painter of exteriors. He is drawn to the nature by the force of strong light whose effects he tries to investigate in various relationships. By painting Dubrovnik landscapes, especially its marinas, he looks first of all, for the breaks and their light reflection. He is not interested in the recognizability of details, even when he decides to paint well-known Dubrovnik landmarks, whose forms he marks in basic masses. The contours are not clear even in these cases because his light never has sharp borders. This is his primary interest. Sometimes, the colourist interpretation of light that draws the most intensive colours from motives is the reflection of the interior light of the author. He transposes it to the canvas in big playing blots.
The rocks viewed from the peninsula of Lapad and discerned between the waving sea and flickering sky, become, in the latest of Smokvina’s interpretations of the same motive, different blots that lose their own form in the dramatic colourist relationship with fragments of light. Everything becomes a play of tangible light with wondrous and surprising shifts. The landscape becomes almost abstract, while the sea ridges or some other rocks remain only in the subconscious base of the painting. When the artist includes a human figure in the landscape, he uses a nude in order for the flesh to blend with the changes of the natural light, so the body disintegrates into an unrecognizable form. It is dematerialized and becomes a bare colourist accent in the landscape. The painting tends towards the abstract while its surface vibrates in various light effects. Tonko Smokvina investigates in them the relationships within the scales of the same colours. The sensual colours in various tones of yellow, orange and dusty rose are contrasted by dark green, turquoise, lead blue and violet. Like the nudes in a landscape, reefs, rocks, and sails are also a challenging painting motive of Tonko Smokvina. They help to establish a dynamic relationship of blots of colour, to investigate the nuances of white, and the waving of strong light in these azure whites. The triangular form, as the matrix of a spread sail, becomes the recognizable motive leading gradually towards the abstract.
The starting form of a painted motive serves to Smokvina only as the trigger for the imagination of his colourist compositions. He creates with a strong stroke of his brush, the strained relationship of whirling colours that radiate with their maximum intensity, producing dramatic colourist relations. This is a good beginning from which we can discern an inciting creative way that can definitely produce new painting surprises.
Vesna Kusin
(translated by Živan Filipi, Ph.D)
