Braco Bravacic

The children of artists have always had a very unique opportunity to create and overlap two reciprocal images – the one of their real life experience with its creative reflection in the art work of their parents. When I think of these two images, I refer to a whole kaleidoscope of actual situations versus those inspiring moments which, as they appear on canvas, can uncover the essence of an artist’s individuality.

I compare my father’s life with his artistic opus, and I come to an equation: his personality has been fully affirmed through a skillful exploration of the various creative disciplines with which he has always been so passionately involved.

My father’s painting hasn’t been developed through a thorough consideration of the final results. Neither has it ever reflected the anxiety imbued by the elusive nature of artistic inspiration. On the contrary, he has committed himself to pictorial research, in between other preoccupations, such as yacht design, architecture and the composition of music. But it was always the visual he has eagerly returned to, with the sparkle of an authentic visionary, with the eye of a true professional, and, last but certainly not least, the heart of a child.

It is only lately that painting has prevailed over his other activities, resulting in a more intrinsic and thus more enjoyable creative flow.

An artist’s mind wanders through rich visual imagery and uses each and every possibility to analyze a code of specific pictorial situations. In addition to this process my father has always regarded his ideas as resources of Beauty itself.

The temperas displayed in this exhibition have been created mainly over the past five years. They were often painted quickly, aiming for an instant reproduction of the interior images, created with the utmost fidelity into the outside, “objective” world…if one isn’t alert the image will pass by, even disappear, dispersing with no trace into the nothingness from which it originated.

A true artist can feel the modalities of his talent. In order to explore them more completely he is keen to experiment and vary ideas and their technical resolutions. If he takes no risks he can’t reach deeper, metaphysical spaces, in which the intellectualizing coquetry with himself usually doesn’t bring the fruits he has been aiming to achieve.

As my father’s artistic career developed in a radial, interdisciplinary way, his creativity has been distributed into several fields, simultaneously perpetuating each other. The outcome is an obvious summary of varied and layered artistic experiences. This has ultimately helped him to orient himself more surely toward a clearly defined visual concept, with highly structured technical requirements and broadly stylized surfaces of dynamic color patterns in his painting.

Great practicality is reflected in the economically treated spatial planes and skillfully applied perceptual tricks, and his inclination towards experimentation is evident even from his earliest, childhood tempera paintings.

As a boy, Bravacic was constantly attracted to the beautiful scenery of Dubrovnik, his native town, as he admired it from his window. In itself, this image is the ideal cradle from which to raise the creative mind. With the broken lines of the city walls and simplified tonal scales, the town can easily be seen as an abstract skeleton of countless variations, or a constructivist, decorative arabesque.