detail from: KRK Art dizajn

FIERY PICTURES OF ILIJA SAULA

By Dragan Jovanović Danilov

The painting of Ilija Šaula could be defined as self-exploration and self-enlightenment by which one dives into the depths where the “shell of ego” resides.  He is an artist of Mediterranean sensibility and spirituality in whose picture one discovers a lyrical ecstasy and dramatization which prevails over the mimetic representative paradigm of the painting. “Know how to live in oneself,” sang the Russian poet Tyuichev. This verse imposes itself upon me as I view the musically live pictures of Ilija Šaula. This artist does not explore too deeply in darkness, but his world builds upon the light of day. His artistic language evokes a rich register which from poisonous green moves into a warm coloristic palette in which red, copper, gold, incarnate, crimson, and warm ochre prevail. The decorative nature of this painter is illuminated with an interior marking. An invisible interior world is here visually transformed. Painting becomes a field flooded by poetry of an interior brightness. Hence in this artistic painting the joy of life and a bright orphism is manifested.

In the painting of Ilija Šaula we see a sunny world which burns under the glare of light. Ilija Šaula is a true matriarch. He has a received, felt, almost erotic relationship to landscape, water, tree—in one word-- to all elements. For this artist nature is like for all ancient poets, the Magna Mater or the Great Goddess. In this artist, emotion is essentially rendered naked and mentally evoked.  Dionysian joy of painting is decisive in these works which are characterized by gesticulated dramatism and coloristic musicality.  I don’t think we will err if we say that Ilija Šaula is an lyrical poet in artistic painting. Everything on his canvasses is lit up, sublime, levitated. Color is full of diluted swirling, immersion and a summery ripeness of gold. On Šaula‘s picture we recognize the view of how earth spews fire, that frenzied matter, that glowing magma and lava which spills over.  Šaula surrenders to landscape, but he never treats it directly and scrupulously, but rather searches and inevitably discovers the most expressive moments of atmosphere. Therefore on his canvasses everything visually vibrates and trembles, yet is stylistically purely and clearly defined. The paintings of Ilija Šaula therefore have a sunny character.  In these paintings we encounter something of the romantically conceived beauty. Something of Novalis’ sentence that the world always needs to be repeatedly romanticized.  Šaula is the creator of an original visual painting which are inhabited by butterflies, archipelagos, volcanos, fantastic regions, magical flowers and birds among which the Phoenix has the priority.  The painting “Phoenix” is the highest achievement of Ilija Šaula.  There is no deeper myth of the one of ashes and phoenix—a bird which lived six centuries, burned up in the burial pyre  and then rose from the ashes with the renovated youth to live through the next cycle.  The concept and memory of Phoenix is lost in the deep past of classical Mesopotamia, the hot deserts of Arabia, under the clear sky of Africa. Herodotus wrote that the Phoenix appears rarely in Egypt—once in 500 years. This eternal bird whose body is half golden and half red, and which mostly resembles an eagle, makes a nest out of fragrant branches and in it burns up of its own heat, to resurrect again out of its ashes in a flame which purifies.  The wondrous bird Phoenix burns up in flame but out of its own ashes flies again and resurrects younger and more beautiful than she was, because she cannot surrender to flame. In the ashes, therefore is the hidden spark out of which will grow a torch.  Phoenix is a transformed eagle of eternal renewal, the fiery stream of the will. This symbolism is entirely clear—death, cyclic birth, resurrection, and immortality.  Or in alchemic symbolism it is the destruction and new formation of the changeable Materiae Primae on the path to the Stone of wisdom. The painter burns down old hierarchical paining structures. Like a phoenix, he subjects himself to symbolic death, so that he could, led by erotic overstepping, prepares for entry in a new life. This is dying and undoing for the purpose of renewal of life and the arrival of rebirth.

Ilija Šaula is with one leg in reality and with the other in the dream world, so that the world which he offers to us is captured in a state between dream and reality. All of this is in the paintings of Ilija Šaula ennobled with a visual warmth and visual embodiment. Šaula’s paintings, as if they originated in some painting forge, painted flashy jets of paste or fiery volcanic lava. And truly, his paintings are filled with Bengali radiant colors (cadmium, sunny ocher, orange hues), colorfully enflamed. The beauty of his sights is due to their ether-like quality and juicy pictorial material of ripe summer afternoons. Šaula’s painting expression is rich in dramatic accents by which the drama established a lively rhythmic movement. This artist uncovers the regions of his environment as a precious endemic. He esteems the beautiful, according to Plato’s “flowering of being.” This art of painting prevails over the rational, while the poetic atmosphere and colorful refinement overcome stylization and rational calculation. Through the atmosphere of reflection, Šaula offers a region illuminated with a mystic light. And light, as it was already spoken in traditional writings, is able to radiate out of oneself only by one who has light in the soul.

The presentations of Ilija Šaula with miraculous picturesque vegetation suggests the paradise-like condition of the human being, but also some oneiric absence, a world far away from noise and rage of time. They are transfixed by an Arkadian coloristic eroticism. Šaula did succeed with floral symbolism and magical impregnation of nature to show in his painter’s field a desire for space of a happy residence.  We discover in his pictures a kind of prayer of purity, an invitation to renew that intimate contact with nature, and in her secret bosoms discover a warm area for ourselves. The canvasses of Ilija Šaula surely do not fit into our informational-communicative time. But his painter’s activity affirms that even in the digital surrounding of contemporary culture, the picture continues to live as a product of manual processing and emotional exuberance. Through a complex register of light and shadow, warm and cold tonality, Ilija Šaula tells the story of a plant-like spirituality, the light of Creation and her evolutionary warmth which alone can provide protective heat from the metaphysical cold. 

In the attachment see the catalogue with Saula's work 

DOKUMENTI

Saula-katalog (2.88 mb)

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