Ana Petković Basletić
Tendencies in Croatian Graphic Arts Production Today — Continuity and Deviations

The Croatian Print Triennial, a long-time event organised by the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, is conceptualised as a national exhibition platform, more accurately a stage for a confrontation of creative artistic achievements of Croatian printmakers within a three-year period. Due to outstanding circumstances (the pandemic, the earthquake and the displacement of the Department from its home because of the reconstruction), this time the Triennial gathers the printmaking accomplishments of Croatian authors spanning the 2020–2024 period. Aiming for this exhibition to present an overview of the current tendencies among artists on the Croatian graphic scene, as well as the prevalent strategies of facing today’s challenges in the graphic medium, the concept of the 9th Croatian Print Triennial, keeping the format of exhibition participation by inviting acknowledged graphic artists to exhibit and selecting among authors who answered the open call, stepped away from some of its previous settings. Instead of defining a theme, a strict purist approach to the discipline and a separation between the invited and the selected authors, this year’s Triennial focuses on an examination of the graphic arts medium, i.e. on challenging printmaking within the scope of its premises, as well as the possibilities of opening it to extensibility of fine-art printing parameters or breakthroughs into the field of expanded graphic arts. The very exhibition structure establishes a dialogue between the invited and the selected artists as equal participants, whose works are systematised in the set-up into nine smaller theme sections. The concept authors gathered 34 artists by invitation, and the Selection Committee — out of a total of 75 artists who answered the open call, including art academy students — selected the works of 31 artists, covering a relevant pattern of a broad generational range of authors mainly stemming from four large Croatian graphic arts centres (Rijeka, Osijek, Split and Zagreb). The key criteria in the selection process, in addition to technical mastery as a prerequisite, were the originality of vision and production, i.e. the impressiveness of visual solutions confirmed in the technical, procedural, thematic and conceptual premises.

The multiplicity of narratives and the polyvalence of creative approaches in an equilibrium with the tangible world and reality at the Triennial have been categorised into nine separate congruent sections — Ideograms, Printing Plate Challenge, Appropriated Places, Introspections, Metamorphoses, Constructs, Reinterpretations, Archetype and Reality Aspects, whose order is defined by the exhibition space, and which outline the dominant relevant artistic issues and thematic preoccupations — from emotional and psychological individual and collective neuralgies, to the natural and cultural interpretation and notion of time and space and vision of the present in the future and the future in the present, to a dialogue with history and art history. The works inside each section depict a range of graphic arts paradigms of similar poetics, ways of visual perception and coding of original visions. The sections Ideograms, Appropriated Places, Introspections, Metamorphoses, Archetype and Reality Aspects include the works whose authentic reality becomes an individualist diegetic reality, and the works an allusive or evocative hypothesis, i.e. “the dark mirrors of the truth”.1 From an interpretational point of view, Ideograms include prints by Nevenka Arbanas, Zlatko Keser, Zdenka Pozaić and Ana Sladetić, and combine individualist playful stylisation and free associations of raw naivety or lyrical expressiveness, thanks to which the realistic form and descriptive qualities of the objective world are sublimed into abstract signs and iconic representations of the unspeakable essence of the substantial. The theme section Appropriated Places singles out works that refer to place, but also time, as its implicit dimension. Playing with, upgrading, modifying urban and landscape motifs of both real or imaginary topoi, Mirjana Vododpija, Edvin Dragičević, Hamo Čavrk, Jakov Žaper, Miran Šabić, Josip Zanki, Renata Ladović Meštrović, Josip Jozić, Viktorija Križanović and Marina Brkić develop dystopian and utopian landscapes, urban landscapes, internal homelands and counter-worlds ‘beyond infinity’. In that series of alternative expanses and idealised, meditative or urban ambiences, only Edvin Dragičević’s works blend opposite starting points into a unique heterotopic image of a vanishing civilisation and its world. Introspections are by morphology, iconography and realisation the most heterogeneous section. The gathered self-referential works by Melinda Kostelac, Maja Rožman, Celestina Vičević, Ana Vivoda, Iva Ćurić, Marko Dajak, Vasja Irma Ivković and Kristina Novosel are the coded reflections of personal emotional and mental states stemming from an intersubjective relationship between the ‘self’ and the reality, but also a search for one’s own balance in the world. The Metamorphoses section assembles the works by Viktor Popović, Kristina Restović, Igor Čabraja, Silvio Vujčić, Marko Živković, Antonio Kutleša and Jakov Pašalić. Although these works are mainly based on a photographic model of a real excerpt from objective reality, they are not burdened by the necessity of the literal. Quite the contrary, subtle indications, incorporated into the representation through individual procedural and subtextual strategies, lead to the visual and semantic transformations of the original. Unlike the mentioned section, Reality Aspects highlight typologically different personal and social phenomena of current reality. By method of direct confrontation, immersion or ironisation, prints by Tanja Dabo, Toni Meštrović, Ivona Pupačić, Lora Elezović, Ivana Bajcer, Vice Tomasović, Svebor Vidmar and Ljubica Golubić focus on violence, intolerance, war threat, artificial intelligence, COVID-19 pandemic, consumerism, as well as more carefree, but no less important, events like travels and celebrations or the art world’s pretension. Ironisation and confrontation are characteristic of the works of Iva Gobić, Kristina Antolić, Duje Medić and Danilo Potočnjak, gathered in the Archetype section, whose central interest is anthropological reality. Starting from that point of view, the artists play with iconographic assumptions based on the ancient role models of Venus and ritual masks. The ideals of magical qualities and power in contemporary concepts and idioms in the wake of historical styles (naturalism, neo-expressionism, new realism, pop art and punk subculture) typical of interventions, simplifications or exaggerations, are deformed into transformed characters instilled with social criticism. A transhistorical approach of absorption of cultural heritage and art as collective memory inside new creative concepts is visible also in the Reminiscences section. It includes the works by Ivana Franke, Domagoj Sušac, Iva Šarić and Nikola Marinčić, which revise and actualize the art history style origins with fresh intellectual positions and recode them with new experiences, and in doing so giving them contemporary starting points. On the other hand, the section Printing Plate Challenge, Constructs and Reinterpretations gather different design realisations and artistic stimuli. Instead of receptive elaborations of reality and its reflections, the focus is on instrumental and process-oriented design which is objectified in rational-conceptual solutions of an abstract expression. The Printing Plate Challenge section, including the works by Daniela Cikatić Javorčić, Maja S. Franković, Jelena Jelača, Veronika Koprivnjak, Letricija Linardić, Mirna Marijanović, Mario Matoković, Leo Pavlović, Dajana Radoš, Tin Samaržija and Jasna Šikanja, as well as its analogical extension in the Constructs unit, with the works by Mario Čaušić, Krunoslav Dundović, Dajana Džafo, Igor Konjušak, Vida Meić and Dominik Višnjić, provide an insight into the technical abilities and achievements of the contemporary graphic arts medium, which skilfully balances between tradition and innovation.

Printmaking, due to the many demanding stages of the design process, extremely conditioned by the choice of technique and clearly defined processes, is often outlined as a particularly complex visual discipline. The element of skill and creativity within strictly defined standards has already proven for some Croatian graphic artists as inadequate or limiting in the realisation of creative inventions. Artistic creative curiosity, invention and striving to modernise expression paved the way to exploration and resorting to more freedom. By implementing untypical surfaces, analytical processuality, mental and digital matrices and/or interconnections with other types of visual art and new technologies, and by shaping the works into graphic arts installations, objects, spatial concepts and actions, the artists in their works gave precedence to contextual-conceptual connotations over mastery and technical parameters. Transgressions and breakthroughs in polemic-experimental approaches of these previous works by our outstanding individualists and brilliant pedagogues, and the acceptance of digital prints as equal to the traditional ones have guaranteed the pluralist climate we have today, which, in addition to fostering ‘pure’ printmaking, encourages the works which in their deflections both contradict and affirm the key settings and technical definitions of the discipline, simultaneously challenging and broadening the notion of the graphic arts medium. Taking into account the accumulated experience with the works that expand the interpretations of the given boundaries and the resulting changes has set the tone of the 9th Croatian Print Triennial. Underlining the combination of métier, the authenticity of visual expression and/or the imperative of contemporary views in the selection process, as well as opening the proposition towards, tentatively, more radical parameters (larger scale, spatially progressive works, multi-layered combinations of different multipliable and diverse techniques, interactions with new technologies, even anti-aesthetic tendencies) allowed a distancing from the archaic and purist concept, albeit without a drastic loss of balance and extreme deviations.

Thanks to a more liberal conceptual orientation, the Triennial has gathered prevalent artistic phenomena and a broad range of approaches to the discipline, which equally values the traditional approach and contemporary practices. It has also displayed a present multiformity of poetics and delineated current visual possibilities and thematic predilections of contemporary Croatian graphic artists. The exhibited pieces, based on their formal typology, could be categorised into print sheets, print portfolios, graphic artist’s books, digital prints and graphic arts installations, objects or actions, and based on the design approach, as a reflection of different, legitimately profiled artistic trends, these can be classified into three groups — traditional prints, experimental-conceptual prints and digital prints. Strictly taken, traditional prints imply adherence to all the norms and specific qualities of a printing technique, primarily the intaglio and relief printing, and impression printing on paper, be it handmade or industrially manufactured, creatively based on original drawing. This group includes the renowned Croatian print artists like Nevenka Arbanas and Zdenka Pozaić, this time also joined by painter Zletko Keser. Still, it is apparent how other generations of graphic artists (Igor Konjušak, Kristina Antolić, Jasna Šikanja, Letricija Linardić, Josip Jozić, Duje Medić, Viktorija Križanović), as well as the newer ones (Maja Perak, Tin Samaržija, Leo Pavlović, Jelena Jelača) committedly and successfully create, persistently opting for the manual stroke of traditional printmaking. The said group is joined by Josip Zanki, who, ever faithful to his original dense drawing and etching idiom, exceptionally screen-prints the roughness and the organic beauty of the landscape of Kornati.

The term experimental-conceptual prints encompasses a broad spectrum of divergent procedures and multimedia deviations, unhindered by traditional rules and in line with artistic impulses and concepts, questioning visual and technical dimensions, developing new possibilities of the medium. The multiplicity of deviations from the conventional is evident on the one hand in smaller or bigger process-related and material divergences in any of the creative phases (e.g. physical or chemical discrepancy, the notion of work as a work in progress, the use of readymade matrices or papers, readymade backgrounds which are not paper, or pigments like dust, earth, sand etc.), in the homogenisation of different procedures and diverse techniques and in playing and consciously blending prints with different technologies — from photography and photo-mechanical methods (montage photography, photoengraving or phototransfer), to digital elaboration and digital motif processing, to a combination with science, new 3D technology — or in a stronger or weaker interaction with other visual media (spatiality, perforations, application, improvements by varnish or spray, thread etc.). On the other hand, this group also includes more conceptual realisations as spatial or stage concepts or graphic arts actions which finally can and need not be materialised as a graphic sheet. The line between the first trend and the latter is partly flexible. Graphic impressions on paper printed by basic printing techniques with more moderate shifts, such as less extreme process-oriented and technical novelties (the use of unusual materials — ropes, foils etc. or methods — dry aquatint, analytical process), or visual patterns connected with photography, but without direct appropriations or photomontages, as well as digital processing of motifs fluctuate between the traditional and experimental-conceptual category, from today’s, more open, point of view, they can be classified as traditional prints as well. This fluid zone of moderate deviations of traditional reception includes prints of infinite expanses by Hamo Čavrk. His prints are joined by thematically elaborate, realistic etchings of a minute line structure and refined details by Edvin Dragičević, Miran Šabić, Ivona Pupačić and Ivana Bajcer, which find their starting point in reality and its photographic excerpts, and the etched drawings by Ana Sladetić, enhanced by a motif transposition into light bodies. This group is also complemented by the antipode works by Jakov Pašalić and Mirna Marijanović.

The semi-permeable ‘osmosis’ between the highlighted orientations stops with intensifying experimental-conceptual components in the works’ design. Still, within the scope of this trend as well, the pieces generally still predominantly come to life in the customary form of a graphic print and paper sheet, which can be structured into graphic arts installations, artists’ books or graphic arts objects. The creative discourses and individualist approaches to the conceptualisation of an art work generate a pluralism of methodologies and strategies which is hard to systematise. The transformation of the medium itself is implemented by the means of both familiar, old, and new tools. The applied divergences in individual examples lead to a negation of the hand’s auratic stroke, even repetition. Despite the heterogeneous aspect, among the works in this category it is possible to discern two individual pivotal creative impulses: the imperative of experimentation and the imperative of narrative, according to which they should be classified. The imperative of experimentation gathers artistic explorations of the graphic art’s mastery and technical givens, i.e. deflections from the methodology of a traditional processing of the matrix with a contemporary elucidation and application of alternative possibilities of the printmaking process. A step away from the customary procedures and materials is implementable at all levels — from the matrix to the elaboration and printing, sometimes even to the print run. Differences, specificities and the range of possibilities of the delineated métier option are reflected in the works by Maja S. Franković, an active torchbearer of one of the tendencies within the scope of the option, and in the works by Mario Matoković, Dajana Radoš, Mario Čaušić, Melinda Kostelac, Vida Meić, Daniela Cikatić-Javorčić, Veronika Koprivnjak and Dominik Višnjić. Maja S. Franković’s playful abstract-figurative monumental masterful displays are recognisable for their unrestrained layering of diverse techniques and materials, as well as readymade applications. On the other hand, aestheticized intaglio large-scale abstract prints by Mario Matoković and Dajana Radoš represent the two sides of process-oriented thinking devoid of almost any narrative. In the wake of Josip Butković’s works, Mario Matoković in his prints records the procedural phases applied onto the matrix, which constantly changes and slowly disappears with etching corrosion, while Dajana Radoš, thanks to minimal interventions of drypoint and etching, registers the changes found, i.e. occurred, on the board during a period of thirty years. In the context of exploration in the medium through a process of creative change in gravure printing and ongoing making, Mario Čaušić’s rhizomatic graphic installation depicts the most complex construct. Apart from experimentation and process-orientation, the aspect of space is also inherent to the installation. Modular graphic motif compounds of abstract-textural elements and geometricized forms of a dehumanised futurist mood are dynamically connected in a spatial correlation grid. The making of puzzling scenes by layering several printing plates is part of Melinda Kostelac works as well. Her expressive abstract forms and barely legible typographic diary records are visualisations of the flow of time in intaglio and collagraphy, complemented by sand and photoetching. It is the increased number of collagraphies, in the technical sense, that is one of this Triennial’s interesting phenomena. Cardboard printing technique, the printmaking process of which is possible in gravure and relief printing, yields impressive final results. In addition to Maja S. Franković and Melinda Kostelac, who use collagraphy as one of their building techniques, Vida Meić, Daniela Cikatić Javorčić, Veronika Koprivnjak and Dominik Višnjić use this to a certain point experimental technique as the basic technique. Except Daniela Cikatić Javorčić, who combines collagraphy with linocut, other authors improve the collagraphic matrix with drypoint or even print it without added interventions. With the help of designed matrix — bases, which can also be readymade objects, such as Tetra Pak packaging (Veronika Koprivnjak) or floorboard segments (Vida Meić), the printmakers construct complex and texturally compelling abstract prints. Vida Meić further analytically dissects intaglio prints, which summarise the flow of time, in an artist’s book in the digital medium. The zone of experimentation imperative also includes the intermedia design realisations by Krunoslav Dundović, Marko Živković, Nikola Marinčić and Antonio Kutleša. Under the omnipresent influence of digital technologies in the era of virtuality and technocrary, the breakthrough of the technological substratum in the creative processes of graphic discipline is not at all surprising. Respecting the integrity of the graphic technique and the sheet format, Krunoslav Dundović’s abstract aquatint brilliant alchemical gradations are a materialisation of a visual created by different alternating blends of the digital (computer) and analogue (printing). A similar approach is also applied by Marko Živković in his aquatint sfumatos. Nikola Marinčić transfers the recorded soundscape into visual variations by superimposing digital print and silkscreen print. A particularly exciting intermedia concept, based on a dynamic exchange between the analogue and the digital-technological, is embodied in two three-part installations by the young graphic artist Antonio Kutleša. The basic biomorphic etching of a filigree touch is transformed by the artist into new stages of development — into a print from a 3D modelled and printed matrix and into a blind printed graphic arts object.

According to the previously mentioned differentiation, the second sub-trend in the experimental-conceptual current is summarised in the narrative imperative. Although inside this group as well the works are mostly in the form of a print sheet or graphic arts installation, with a contemporary elaboration and application of alternative métier and intermedia and new media approaches the creative discourses and individualist conceptualisations of the works are articulated into the complexes of original visions.

A contemporised approach, free from the cult of the hand (Focillon), in the era of pos-tauratic art (Benjamin) and the iconic turn (Boehm) are primarily realised through visual patterns directly related to photography and its digital manipulation, and with the internet as a mass digital visual repository of reflections of contemporary reality and everyday communication. Photography, a medium interweaving the real and the magical, reality and illusion, the concrete and the accidental, the real and the virtual, is a tool that provides artists in contemporary practices a more immediate juxtaposition with the experiential world and social phenomena. By integrating photography into the graphic representation by implementing diverse artistic strategies — from manipulations, simulations, illusionist simulacra and assimilations to direct appropriations — the artists intensify the theme’s contextualisation, but in doing so, unburdened by the necessity of photographic literality, they play with its visual perception, hidden meanings and possible subtextual content. The multiplicity and intensity of artistic resemantisations of reality and the material, based on a photographic image, is displayed in the prints by Viktor Popović, Toni Meštrović, Mirjana Vodopija, Tanja Dabo, Igor Čabraja, Kristina Restović, Silvio Vujičić, Jakov Žaper, Lora Elezović, Marko Dajak, Dajana Džafo, Marina Brkić and Manuela Košević. Apart from the prints designed entirely or partly in the gravure printing techniques or a rare lithography appearance at the Triennial (Tanja Dabo’s portfolio), serigraphy prints prevail in this group.

A similar aspect of a procedural, narrative-defined, breakthrough in serigraphy comes with the prints by Viktor Popović and Toni Meštrović. Preoccupied by archiving lost and altered localities, Viktor Popović uses exaggerated photographic phantasms of the historical interiors of the Vranyczany-Dobrinović palace in Zagreb to evoke entropic changes conditioned by the flow of time. The metaphysical anxiety of an almost monochromatic representation on the verge of disappearance is achieved by using dust from the site as pigment. Printing with dust, in this case soil, is also applied in Toni Meštrović’s work. This multimedia artist transfers documentary photographs of his island therapy work during the COVID-19 lockdown. Among the specific process-oriented transgressions of accentuated narration are Silvio Vujičić’s diptych and Lora Elezović’s print installation. Silvio Vujičić highlights the motif fragility of a monumentalised hand X-ray image with the flimsiness of the textile surface, thinned by means of a series of chemical processes to a cobweb texture, and Lora Elezović creates unique 3D stereoscopic displays with exotic travel motifs by overlapping digital print and etching. Applying the procedure of layering multiple printing techniques to expand the thematic context and subtext is visible also in Kristina Restović’s works, in which she resemanticises photographically generated dichotomic motifs of Split’s ornamental architecture and medical aids into humorous allusive prints, and in the stylistically contrasting prints by Marko Dajak and Dajana Džafo (figuration-abstraction), which both compress and analyse the complex issues of one’s own memories, or in Jakov Žaper’s print, which hints to an abstract-allusive reinterpretation of the initial serigraphy with an abstracted depiction of Rijeka’s stadium. No less conceptual, interesting or demanding are the prints made in one single technique. Mirjana Vodopija transposes the fluidity and constant change of water, one of the basic elements, into poetic infinite monochromatic serigraphs of a brilliant pastel colour scheme, in which the uniformity expanse of a lake is broken by linear lines of allegorical associativity. On the other hand, Igor Čabraja’s aquatint transcends the seemingly tranquil depiction of a black diaphanous outer space expanse, with a barely discernible international MIR space station, by way of an antonymous connotational play into visions of a dreamer’s ascent, but also wartime darkness, condensing thus in them the entire dichotomy of the historical moment. Tanja Dabo examines the state of collective frenzy and general crisis of events from a social point of view. Influenced by the daily necessity of facing the burgeoning spiral of violence and hate from revived radicalisms of nationalist and totalitarian ideologies during the entire year-long research project Casual Evil, the artist in the lithographic print portfolio The Pit 2024 revisits the portfolio The Pit from 1944 by Zlatko Prica and Edo Murtić. The complex lithographic translation of Ivan Goran Kovačić’s shocking emblematic poem, accompanied by visual reinterpretations — transfers of photographs of hate speech and symbols of historical criminal regimes taken in public spaces — is an activist act of judgment and a denunciation of a specific pathological social phenomenon of current reality. The doubts imposed by the objective state on a personal level, the unfathomability of the flow of time and the impossibility of a clear articulation of lived experiences, starting from a photographic model, are addressed in silkscreen print by Marina Brkić and Manuela Košević as well.

The group defined by the imperative of narrative, in addition to works based on photography assimilation, includes works of an accentuated theme and conceptual-métier concretisation. The scope encompasses graphic installations by Roberta Vilić, prints by Celestina Vičević and Iva Ćurić, Kristina Novosel’s print portfolio, Vasja Irma Ivković’s artist’s book and Maja Rožman’s graphic action, which, apart from reception (the Introspections segment), share an unconventionality of approach to materialisation of individualised graphic arts concepts. Celestina Vičević in gravure print on unbleached linen prints out the plant world (leaves of grass), a visual metaphor of growth, creation, tenderness, transformation, strength, i.e. a visible expression of an unspeakable progressive female principle of a dual cosmic rhythm. The sublimed essence of cosmic energy is accentuated by thread structure component which, as an added narrative layer, underline meditative aspirations and the longevity of internal cognitive processes. Iva Ćurić’s lettrist diptych, in the wake of previous works which are based on allusive approximations of non-material reality from the scope of natural sciences, as well as device-art installations, addresses the disbalance created by a lack or absence of elements inside the system and its repercussions. The thematic deflection in the execution is manifested as a perceptive challenge thanks to the blind embossing and additional blurring of the visible made by spray application. A step away from the basic format to simulate the content in Vasja Irma Ivković’s artist’s book is achieved by incorporating the printed lithography rotulus into a hand-winding mechanism, imitating digestion. On the other hand, Roberta Vilić’s multi-part self-referential installation is defined by an intimist subdued confessionally toned speech. With a minimalist achromatic abstract idiom, the artist visually registers personal emotional turmoil of a love coming to an end. The introspective narrative in artists’ books is additionally underlined by the words in the heading of the readymade surface (dictionary pages) and lapidary typewritten sentence excerpts. Typewritten textual content, next to a visual depiction of an obituary, is the constituent design element of Kristina Novosel’s disturbing print portfolio. Visual narrative of the subject of losing a loved one, expressed as a contrast between memory and oblivion, in an inversely proportional relation between word and ‘image’ gradually develops a notion of oblivion of death to the expense of precious memories. Although the emotional dimension of the personal and the experienced is also characteristic of Maja Rožman’s graphic arts action, her artistic intervention critically generalises self-referential starting points. Focused on pointing her finger and raising awareness of the seriousness of consequences of implicit verbal gender favouritism and verbal violence in seemingly benign communication in a business environment, the artist uses process-oriented strategies of analogy and simulation, kneeling on wooden matrices, to replicate a barely discernible pain of humiliation in a print/scar blind embossing on the knee skin. The graphic action, documented in a series of photographs, at the same time addresses the very extent of perceiving the graphic arts medium. Among the profiled artistic currents within the graphic arts discipline, as the last group we should single out digital prints. In the era of technocracy and, in McLuhan’s words, ‘electronic interdependency’, it is an expression and symptom of digital time, and whose, both direct and indirect, origins stem from the idea of making art by means of technology and cognitively programmed art. In such a mutuality prints got their legitimate digital counterpart, in fact a simulation in which the ‘matrix’ is electronic, i.e. a computer programme, application or another digital procedure which also defines the ‘stroke idiom’, while the ‘technique’ is a type of digital print and printing means printing out; the surface is still paper, but also any other material which can be printed on, such as aluminium composite (Ivana Franke), stone (Iva Gobić), sticker (Vice Tomasović), fabric (Ana Vivoda). Although at this year’s Triennial digital prints are not present in large numbers, they are represented by the conceptually elaborate, visually evocative and contextually interesting works by Ivana Franke, Domagoj Sušac, Iva Gobić, Renata Ladović Meštrović, Ana Vivoda, Vice Tomasović and Svebor Vidmar. Even though these are digital works, the notional starting points and content-related preoccupations are in line with the dominant graphic arts achievements. Ivana Franke’s work, spiritually close to new tendencies’ experimentalism, is a computer image rendering of a programmed manipulation of a four-dimensional body — a hypercube.2 What is inherent to the abstract totality of ‘fractal’3 representations, of a mathematical reality invisible to the eye, is the artist’s immanent and ongoing creative preoccupation with researching sensory perception and provoking sensory possibilities. A different discourse, similar in its ambivalence, is in the background of the works by Domagoj Sušac and Iva Gobić. Their digital prints in authentic creative concepts on a thematic level address art as cultural heritage — with Domagoj Sušac as homage and with Iva Gobić as a point of reference — as well as encourage thinking about the medium in the context of post-media and of creative field expansion. Domagoj Sušac, taking as the starting point a reproduction of new realist Yves Klein’s monochrome IKB 79 (1959), i.e. a neo-Dada ‘self-portrait of the self-portrayed’4, for a rhizome-placed and web-sampled polyptych reaffirms appropriation and repetition as legitimate creative strategies today. On the other hand, Iva Gobić, starting from the photo records of its own evaporating body impressions on stone, images in the wake of iconic archetypal Venus figurines from the Palaeolithic and Yves Klein’s Anthtropometry, affirms the medium extension (graphic arts action) through the graphic arts medium (digital print). Photographs are the basis of Renata Ladović Meštrović and Ana Vivoda’s works, but serving an intimate narrative. The artists, resorting to associative strategies and digital alterations (Renata Ladović Meštrović), or allusive interventions (Ana Vivoda), in representations of individualised self-referential motifs (island/body) embody their own coping with the emotional dimension of experiential reality (the issue of luck/trauma of the lived). On the other hand, digital prints by Vice Tomasović and Svebor Vidmar critically address artificial intelligence and the devastating power of war. The artists approach two burning social issues of today with a disparate approach to programmed drawing. And while Svebor Vidmar’s expressive digital prints are directly generated in a drawing programme, behind Vice Tomasović’s digital print of an allusive name is an original drawing independently generated by way of cyberspace AI and subsequently digitally collaged and painted. Both authors with their different approaches to representation (the strategy of confronting vs. the strategy of testing) feature metaphorical interpretations of an ominous future.

The portrayed heterogeneity of today’s graphic arts production, with the métier expression and the scope of the graphic arts medium, to a digital matrix and updating by exploration and experimentation within the discipline, to conceptual graphic arts thinking and performative actions, has provided an insight into the symptomatic elucidations and innovative aspirations in the ‘noble craft’, creating a crystal-clear image of the graphic arts contemporary tendencies of the moment. An image which, from a time distance and assimilated experience, underlines and redefines Kinert’s premise (1979): “Graphic arts are not just something drawn and printed out, multiplied. It is a way of thinking and loving,” confirming the neverending vitality of the ‘esoteric alchemical black’ medium, as well as its independence and relevance among contemporary art practices.