Exhibitions
Again this year I will bring two interesting photography exhibitions to Vrsar. The first one is the exhibition of the excellent Croatian photographer Marko Vrdoljak, who portrays the details of female beauty in a subtle way. The other one takes us back to the past and the history of Croatian erotic photography.
Marko Vrdoljak, a photographer from Zagreb, in his exhibition The Eroticism of Light plays with the light and shadows in the best photographic way. No matter whether he is dealing with a detail or the whole scene, his exploration of the female body is both interesting and impressive.
Luka Marotti, being an excellent photographer too, devoted his time to the hobby of collecting, thus creating a collection of erotic and nude photography. It is made up of works by various authors: Toše Dabac, Milan Pavić, Zvonimir Golob, Marija Braut, Petar Dabac, Josip Klarica, and more.
Ivan Balić Cobra
Coordinator of exhibitions
Marko Vrdoljak
Marko Vrdoljak was born in Zagreb in 1973. He is the owner of the Five Stars Ltd. company, where he edits and coordinates many publications and projects with which he has been promoting Croatian beauty worldwide for almost ten years. During this period he has been cooperating with ministries, government offices, embassies and cultural institutions.
Vrdoljak’s photograph Sheep’s Paradise, taken in Lika, has been chosen for the cover of the 50th issue of the DigitalFoto Magazine, which was its first cover by a Croatian photographer.
He has published photo monographs Zagreb County, Brijuni National Park, Amazing Croatia and Nerezine, and he is now working on a photo monograph of the National Park Risnjak, photo archive of the City of Rijeka, photo monograph of the art of the Dominican Order in Croatia, and on the project of shooting a promotional film about the City of Zagreb.
He achieved great recognition of his work as a photographer when he signed a contract with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration of the Republic of Croatia to stage two Amazing Croatia exhibitions consisting of 86 photographs of all parts of Croatia, which present its beauties to the world.
ABOUT THE EROTICA OF LIGHT EXHIBITION
With photographs showing different girls, this exhibition will take us through gentle labyrinths of corporeality as well as feelings which influence the beauty of femininity in a subtle way.
Vrdoljak describes the exhibition by saying: ‘When I am taking pictures of a female body, I do not really see the body but I do notice the feeling which shapes it. I believe that the female body in modern media, films, ads, and on the Internet is too vulgarized. Therefore, my main idea was to record the gentle and fine eroticism of corporeality and pay tribute to women.
Nude photography which I am presenting here is based on trust and built relationship with the model I am taking pictures of. For me the female body is a stage of beauty. On it, just like the scenes on a movie screen, barely noticeable dramaturgy and sets made up of a feeling which makes the body what it is at the given moment are taking place. Tiny, milimeter shift is necessary for a certain silhouette or part of the body to alter the message which I can read from erotic attraction to inner fear or insecurity.
The nuances in shades which run through the body while I am shooting it are fascinating. The body gets more and more refined indications of a certain feeling I am trying tocapture on camera. Before every photo shoot, I am introduced to the model with whom I talk about the feelings which make that girl different from the others. The rest is a game of light which, just like magic, creeps into the photograph and makes us both satisfied at the end of the shooting session.
The photographs for this exhibition were taken in both, studios and outdoor locations. What is particularly interesting is that some photos feature girls and prominent people from the Croatian public life.
Luka Marotti
Luka Marotti was born in Šibenik but he finished high school in Zagreb, where he also graduated in art history and philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy. He started working for former Zagreb Television back in 1970. Marotti is the author and director of numerous documentary programmes and films, mostly about culture and heritage but he has also taken up photography, convinced that a photo camera can see better and more in a frame than a video camera can. His work has been presented in several solo and joint exhibitions. He is the winner of various photography awards but he is particularly proud of the Ivo Fabijan Award by the Croatian Journalists’ Association for the best photograph of the year in the category of art and culture. The artist is also a member of the CroartPhoto Club in Zagreb.
This is just a part of what Edda Dubravec wrote about Marotti’s nudes exhibition we are going to see in Vrsar:
“To create a meaningful and organized whole, it is necessary to have some knowledge and be free as well as a bit playful at the same time. But the most important thing is to have a vision. Before us there is a collection of female nudes which Luka Marotti has not been creating for a particularly long time. It might even be said that this is a collection in the making, although its precise framework – the time, from the beginning of the 20th century up to now, and the space, that is the authors, who are Croatian photographers – does indeed offer a relevant and faithful portrayal of the time and aesthetic ideas as well as the criteria for and changes of what was or is considered worthy of telling the story about beauty, women, progress – in short, about who is in front of and behind the lens. Liberation or submission, private or public, the model of beauty then and now, the dictatorship of fashion, the media or a personal attitude are just some of the issues, or problems which are, in their own way, dealt with by each of the authors, who are unquestionably important names in Croatian photography.”
Stjepan Bartolić
Stjepan Bartolić was born in 1967 in Zagreb, where he graduated from the School of Applied Arts, in the graphics section. He is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Workers, Croatian Association of Applied Arts Artists and Croatian Freelance Artists’ Association.
His illustrations have been published in magazines Modra lasta, Prvi izbor, Frka, Zvrk, OK, Klik, Jutarnji list – zabavnik, Q, Kvadrat, Playboy, Banka,and he has also illustrated around 20 novels for children and teenagers. In 1996 he won awards for his illustrations at the Vinkovci Comic Books Salon and in 2003 he won the SFERE award. He has been drawing comic books since 1986.
Bartolić’s works have been published in Polet, Studentski list, Maxi strip, Patak, Plavi zabavnik, Večernji list, Stari mačak, Q. In the Playboy magazine he has been publishing his series ‘Dick Long’ for ten years. He has also been publishing children’s comic strip series in magazines for children. His series ‘Mosquito‘ (script writer: Darko Macan) in the magazine Zvrk has been published for nine years and in Modra lasta the comic strip ‘Deaf Swallows‘ has been published for 17 years in a row. He has published more than a thousand comic strip panels.
He has been animating since 1988, when he started working as an animator for the animated feature film The Magician’s Hat (Croatia Film). In 1990 he worked as an animator for The Little Flying Bears (Zagreb Film) and in 1991, as part of the 1991 project, he directed and animated four one-minute films: Cockroaches, Free Croatia, Feather, and Man, Don’t Get Angry. He also worked as an animator for the animated film Lapitch the Little Shoemaker, and he directed and animated The Christmas Story, Resurrection as well as trailers for the children’s programme on Croatian TV and for the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb. In 2001 he directed and animated Jibro W7.
And what does the author’s hero Dick Long have to say about him? Here are the most interesting parts of the interview published in Playboy on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of their collaboration:
What is Dick like in private, when the artist’s lights are turned off?
- Ah, what am I like? Like everybody else. Actually, we’ve had a lot of disagreements because the artist doesn’t portray me the way I am. He draws me the wrong way. I’m not that ugly, really. Besides that, he exaggerates with length. I mean, who’s got a nose that long?
You don’t really get along, do you?
- The artist and I? No, not at all. The guy is a bastard and an idiot. Do you know that he keeps all the money for himself? Ten years, a hundred episodes, 400 pages, and I still haven’t seen a penny. OK, I understand him, he’s got a wife, two kids, the times are hard… But I don’t need much, cigarettes are my only vice…
… and about women:
Blondes, gingers or brunettes?
- There’s no dilemma here. All of them.
Skinny or fleshy?
- Beauty comes in various shapes and sizes. Personally, I prefer the fleshy ones.
Silicone or sweet mother nature?
- If you ask me, natural is always better. I’m sorry to see your magazine’s become trendy and that all of your girls are the same, shaved, photoshopped, siliconed, cloned. They leave me indifferent. Actually, I always go straight to the last page because there, at the very end, you have a real beauty, somewhere from the ’70s, ’80s, with real boobs and a bushy muff. Where have those women gone?They make me hard. I must have got old.
Robert Pauletta
Robert Pauletta was born on 2nd February 1961 in Premantura. He attended Arts High School in Pula under the direction of Ivan Obrovac. In 1985 he graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of professor Ferdinand Kulmer. During the last two years of university he was a collaborator in Edo Murtić’s atelier.
In 1987 Pauletta was one of the founding fathers of the Croatian Association of Artists (HDLU) in Pula, which later became the Istrian HDLU. Furthermore, he is one of the founders of the Pula School of Applied Arts and Design, where he worked as a teacher from 1991to 2003.
When in November 2003 the MMC LUKA was set up, Pauletta, as its manager, organised a series of cultural and subcultural activities: exhibitions, presentations, round tables, debates on social issues, and more.
Four years ago this artist’s monograph was published by the Istrian HDLU.
Pauletta has been a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists’ Association (HZSU) since 2009. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad: in Pula, Rijeka, Zagreb, Split, Sarajevo, Vienna, Venice, New York, Paris, etc. His works are a part of many national and private collections around the world and he has won various awards for his work.
Art historian Mladen Lučić once wrote about Pauletta’s works which will be exhibited in the Old School in Vrsar:
Pauletta is not Lichtenstein (Roy Lichtenstein, one of the main representatives of pop art), his new expression differs structurally and formalistically from the founder of pop art but it is clear that there is a deliberate similarity in the process itself and in the approach to the creation of a work of art.
For every Pauletta’s change of artistic expression there is a reason, mainly because he listens to and records the time he lives in. Pop art is again relevant today although we cannot talk about a strict style revival of art production from the 1960s. But it is clear that artists react to the dictatorship of the consumer culture which has the supermarket as the centre, junction and a springboard for such a world view. Cheap pornography is present wherever we go, whether it is the one which can, unfortunately, be found on the websites by any child or the one which is disguised, and therefore even more dangerous, and with which all the media and numerous products around us abound. This is precisely why Pauletta addresses us with his new paintings using the language of pornography. The viewer is presented with a sheer reality of the sight.
Faced with that reality, which is literary served to us by Pauletta, in accord with the vulgarity of the times we live in, we still do not have an adequate answer. We cover our eyes in front of it, claiming it is none of our business. While looking at Pauletta’s paintings, we are looking at our clearly and directly represented everyday lives, something that we got used to and that surrounds us. We can be uncomfortable only because of our collective passivity and indirect responsibility as well as because we do not have an answer to the author’s clearly posed question: until when?
Bojan Šumonja
Bojan Šumonja is a visual rather than a verbose type. The description he gave of his first exhibition in Vrsar is clear and brief:
‘The short cycle called Paintings for a Bedroom consists of three paintings painted in Pula in 2004. They are soft core or erotic images based on a saying which goes something like this: ‘Why taint a pure thing such as sex with dirty feelings?’
Šumonja was born in Pula on 29th October 1960. After having finished the Arts High School in Pula, he continued his studies in Venice, where he graduated in sculpture from the Art Academy in the class of professor Tramontino.
The artist has been a member of the Croatian Association of Artists in Istra as well as of the Croatian Freelance Artists’ Association since 1987.
His works have been shown in more than 200 joint and about 90 solo exhibitions both in Croatia and abroad.
He lives and works in Pula.
