45th INTERNATIONAL FINE ARTS COLONY LENDAVA
The attraction of material In art, two distinct types of artistic creative processes can be recognized. The first is when an artist seeks/ finds the right technique and material to use for his idea; the second is when he draws a latent idea in the material to the surface through his own labors. The result is the same in both cases: an idea takes shape. Ever since Panofsky, it has been known that the first step in the analysis of an artwork is to define its style, that is, the essential perception of its form. In comparison, per Clive Bell, form has been a part of artistic definition only since the 20th century. The creation of a form in itself, however, does not ne cessarily mean art; just think of industrial design for example, where material also receives a form. To be able to talk about artistic creations, a form should be endowed with something. The eternal fundamental question of what the addition in distinguishing the artistic from the non-artistic is, is quite difficult to answer, because we are not always in possession of objec tive criteria. In any case, it is true that a work of art is a form made from material. The Lendava Colony is a material-centered work shop where the creative activities of the participating artists are based on finding ideas in, and shaping them from, the given material. Bronze is the common name for several alloys of copper; in everyday lan guage, we think mainly of tin bronze. Its coldness cre ates a strange feeling – unlike the pleasant warmth radiating from wood – so we seldom see it in our living environment. In the mechanical engineering in dustry, however, it is well-nigh indispensable owing to its other properties (pliability, strength, abrasion and corrosion resistance). Nothing proves its dura bility better than jewels, tools and weapons, some over three thousand years old, from the Bronze Age, whence it got its name. Because a peculiarity of the arts is the pursuit of eternity (in certain periods, dura bility was one of the basic assumptions in the defi nition of art), this rigid and hard metal was always appreciated in sculpture. The technique of casting smaller or larger works in bronze is far more compli cated than one would think, since the artist does not shape the metal itself, but an intermediate material like wax, which is substituted during casting when the bronze replaces the molten, flowing material. Basi cally then, an exchange of material takes place, and the artist has no less an important task than to design and produce the final form, even though he cannot feel the structure of the material. A certain degree of skill in designing is required if the outcome of the material is to conform with the artist’s idea.
In addition to material, time and space provide the Lendava colony with stability: namely, the artists create at the same time and the same place. The created artworks, the forms, however, are similar in neither style nor artistic expression; each individual artistic representation carries an asset – each artist has a specific set of symbols, means and forms, as well as a statement – that makes it unique. The primary means of expression for several artists who participated in Lendava’s 45th fine arts colony is not in spatial modeling, but in painting. Their artis tic quality is praiseworthy in that one sees hardly any trace of it in their finished plastics, and new perspec tives even emerge. Between August 20th and Sep tember 5th, 2017, the hands of nine artists formed bronze sculptors at the 45th fine arts colony: Gail Morris from the United Kingdom, Petar Ujević from neighboring Croatia, Transylvanian Attila Pokorny from Hungary. Joining them were Slovenian artists: Cvetka Hojnik, Ferenc Király, Igor Banfi, Miha Pečar, Endre Göntér and Dubravko Baumgartner. Igor Banfi’s Wanderer is a figure of a person about whom we do not know whether man or woman, young or old, place of origin or present destination; in short, we know nothing about it; its face is unrec ognizable. But the Wanderer exists confidently in space, in spite of being turned completely inward, rumiunating. Searching for something within itself and in space. Who is it? We do not meet it for the first time in Igor Banfi’s art. The wanderer is a re curring motif in his earlier paintings and now seems to have been released from the prison of the plane and gained a three-dimensional form. Banfi’s paint ings are essentially landscapes with a particular atmosphere.A figure like those of Caspar David Friedrich stands in these natural, earth-colored seg ments, and seems to belong to two distinct worlds: exactly which two is difficult to decide because of the equal presence of external-internal, profanesacral, and emotional-empirical dualities. Essential ly, the Wanderer is a personification of the human being; its expressionistic formulation mirrors well the turmoil of human existence. By depicting an abstract entity, the figure becomes timeless and universal. The artistic interpretation of everyday objects is not new in fine art history. Already at the beginning of the last century, the ready-made had burst upon so ciety, followed by several artistic trends that used everyday objects as a means of expression. In rais
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