Selected Paintings and Drawings, 2008–2024
Vladimir Puhalac Usnivanja
“I do not paint to explain. I paint to remain.”
— Vladimir Puhalac
About the Artist
Vladimir Puhalac (b. 1980, Valjevo, Serbia) is a composer, poet, and visual artist whose work explores the interior landscape between silence, memory, and devotion. Though best known for his musical work across Europe, his paintings and drawings have quietly emerged over two decades as gestures of endurance, longing, and light.
His works are not planned they appear. Often born during moments of solitude or emotional intensity, his paintings serve as stations in an interior liturgy: fragments of grief, glimpses of transcendence, or the trace of a face no longer present.
He does not consider himself a painter in the traditional sense. But across more than 40 works, a voice emerges one that does not shout, but listens. His subjects are rarely literal. What he paints is presence. A gift made visible.
Catalogue
I. Beginnings: Silence and Descent – p. 6
– Birth (Fødselen)
– Self-Portrait
– The Forest (Skogen)
II. Years of Absence: Echoes Return – p. 12
– Drunk
– Sadness
– Shark
III. Light Begins to Break – p. 18
– Lux In
– Ad Lucem
– The Wave
IV. Spect
– Neon M
– Confus
– Orphan
V. Depth
– De Pro
– Postlud
– Leviath
VI. The A
– Usniva
– Poem (
Birth (Fødselen)
Oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm
Painted in Porsgrunn, December 2008
Created in the aftermath of deep personal loss, Birth is one of Vladimir Puhalac’s most intimate and transformative works. It was painted in solitude during a Norwegian winter, shortly after the sudden death of his mother at the age of 55.
In the stillness of December amid grief, confusion, and a profound sense of abandonment the artist sought light in the void. Birth emerged not with intention, but as a silent ritual. A private answer to sorrow.
The composition presents two luminous vertical thresholds, flanking a central column of light and texture. Within this column lie seven embedded squares markers, perhaps, of memory, or fragments of the divine. Their number may suggest sacred completeness: seven elements, seven pieces of a broken name, seven days of creation. They are not fully formed, yet they imprint the emerging life that rises translucent, spiritual, unfinished
The textured surface is meticulous yet raw. Thin vertical etchings move like breath through the paint — tracing rhythm, time, and transformation. This is not symmetry for beauty’s sake, but for ritual: the flicker of soul becoming matter.
Despite its name, Birth does not shout It whispers It is not celebration, but transfiguration a beginning marked not by joy, but by mystery and the imprint of love.
Self-Portrait
Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm
Painted in Porsgrunn, New Year’s Eve 2008–2009
Painted alone on New Year’s Eve with a bottle of Beaujolais at his side, this Self-Portrait marks a pivotal moment in Puhalac’s early work — a moment when the aftermath of grief begins to solidify into identity.
It was created just days after Birth and The Forest (Skogen), and in many ways, this painting stands between them: no longer vertical light, not yet full chaos but something human forming from both. The vertical brushstrokes of Birth are now absorbed into the figure. The background is symbolic: the light of Birth looms behind the face like an origin not yet left behind. The result is not a likeness but a manifestation of solitude, resilience, and unspoken pain.
The palette is cool, dominated by deep blues and greys, but pierced by a vivid red around the neck — not dramatic, but vital. A pulse. A refusal to disappear. The face is constructed through fragments, squares, and vertical dashes, as if the act of becoming a self is ongoing as if being seen is still a process.
Despite its abstraction, the gaze is unmistakable. Direct, unsentimental, almost weary but also alive. This is not a portrait of despair, but of someone refusing to vanish into it.
It may be the first time Puhalac painted himself not just in form, but in recognition.
The Forset (Skogen)
Oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm
Painted in Porsgrunn, January 2009
Painted several weeks after Fødselen (Birth) and Self-Portrait, Skogen marks the next step in a deepening emotional journey the moment where grief becomes restless, structure dissolves, and seeking begins.
If Birth was stillness, Skogen is motion. If Self-Portrait was a glimpse in the mirror, Skogen is the walk into shadow. What at first appears to be a cityscape is in truth a forest internal, not external. A layered memory. A place of vertical confusion.
The composition surges with rhythm. Brushstrokes are rapid, almost compulsive, as though the act of painting was a way to keep moving. Green dominates, but it’s not comforting. These are not spring leaves these are shadows of growth, layers of weight, impressions left by paths not yet walked.
This is the forest of after Not the return to wholeness but the long pause before it.
Drunk
Oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm
Painted in Porsgrunn, May 2010 (in Roman Scott’s studio)
Created in the Porsgrunn studio of Roman Scott, Drunk emerges from a period of personal disorientation of love unreturned, identity in flux, and a search for meaning through dreams and images. The painting was prompted by Roman himself, who suggested a still from Tarkovsky’s Stalker. What followed was not a copy of a scene, but a reflection of the self seen through it.
The figure haunted, glassy-eyed stares into the void of the canvas with a look of disbelief. Is the bottle empty? Is the soul? Is he trying to let go or hold on? The brushwork is instinctive, almost trembling, raw in its honesty. The result is not a likeness, but a confession. A portrait not of a man, but of a moment in which the self is dissolving.
This was a time of dreams vivid, surreal, Jungian sessions shared with Roman and others, under the guidance of Nada Ivanović. It was also a time of loss, confusion, and the heavy approach of personal rupture. Just months later came a breakdown. And by year’s end, the death of the artist’s father.
Roman Scott, who invited this painting into being, would also pass in the years to come. But his presence lingers in this work — in its generosity, its invitation, its gaze. Drunk is a painting of griefs both seen and unseen. Of friendship and fear. Of holding the brush while the soul trembles.
Sadness
Oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm
Painted in Porsgrunn, May 2011
Painted in a single evening, Sadness emerged during a period of emotional disquiet a quiet grief stirred by unrequited love. It is both a portrait and an abstraction. A face, or rather the suggestion of a face, is submerged within layers of blue, as if dissolving in the medium itself. The features are barely held together like memory or feeling too fragile to take shape.
The canvas pulses with deep indigos, navy, and greys, pierced by veins of faint light. There’s a stillness here, but also an ache a silence that follows after something has been lost, or never gained.
This is not the sadness of drama. It is quieter, more honest like someone sitting with their back turned, waiting for something they know won’t come. The absence itself becomes form.
Shark
Oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm
Painted in Porsgrunn, 2011
This painting began without expectation. A resting place for brushes, a discarded canvas and yet it slowly took on a life of its own. Stroke by stroke, it emerged from the background of other works, accumulating texture, motion, and intensity.
The title Shark came later, when a form revealed itself: sleek, instinctive, possibly dangerous — or perhaps simply ancient. There is no defined figure, but the energy is unmistakable. Something swims beneath.
The work is abstract, improvised, but rich with undercurrents. Built from layers, from residue, from accidental beauty, Shark stands as a reminder that some of the most vivid expressions arise not from planning but from the freedom to simply paint.
LUX IN
(Into the Light)
Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm
Painted in Oslo, November 2018
Ten years after the quiet solemnity of Birth, Lux In emerges with a transformed spirit radiant, present, and alive. Without conscious intention, the artist returns to the same vertical structure of light. But where Birth was about the beginning of grief, Lux In carries the echo of resurrection not in a religious sense, but as an internal return: of breath, of presence, of being.
Painted in Oslo around the anniversary of his mother’s death unknowingly, perhaps intuitively this work stands as a culmination of mourning, and a passage beyond it. The column of light is no longer hesitant or hidden. It now pulses with texture and warmth, its verticality not just a source from above, but a force within.
Unlike earlier works, the brush here is more generous, the pigment more assertive Golds, ochres, and whites build toward something tactile divine without dogma, sacred without temple. The canvas seems to ask: What would the face of God look like if we didn’t fear it? If we met it inside ourselves?
Lux In doesn’t provide an answer. It doesn’t need to. It rests in the act of painting itself a gesture of embodiment, light becoming matter, sadness becoming form, and finally, warmth.
A return.
Not to the beginning but to a place where grief has become color.
Ad lucem (Toward the Light)
Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm
Painted in Bergen, 7 January 2023 (Orthodox Christmas)
This is not light as arrival but as calling. The figures do not stand in light; they are gathered at its edge, turned toward it, facing something they do not yet touch. It is not salvation. It is not clarity. It is only the direction they face.
In this new version of the painting, the contrast is deeper. The crowd is more defined a procession of blurred heads and darkened bodies, anonymous and massed, as if summoned. Above them rises a vertical cascade of flame and light not natural, not divine, but something in between. It moves upward like a liturgy, or downward like a revelation. Either way, it does not explain itself.
There is no iconography here. No cross. No altar. No text. But it evokes a spiritual gesture nonetheless something remembered, but unspoken. The distance between the people and the light is not a failure. It is the very subject of the work.
What they seek is not illumination, but orientation. And in turning toward the unknown they begin to become.
The Wave
Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm
Painted in Oslo, July 2020
Created spontaneously during the summer of 2020, The Wave is one of the rare works completed “in one breath.” It carries the movement of emotion without needing refinement a surge of energy captured without hesitation.
The central form sweeps diagonally, like a surge of water or light. Its layered turbulence gives the impression of clouds, waves, or even smoke elemental, untamed, and unresolved. Despite the power in motion, the palette remains calm and cool, almost sacred.
It was created for a friend, with no greater intention than to give and yet it holds the spiritual energy of something revealed rather than constructed.
A force rising.
A gift made visible.
Neon Man
Pastel and charcoal on paper, 20 × 30 cm
Drawn in Oslo, 2019
Created in the same period as the Confusion Series, Neon Man stands apart as a singular, spectral presence. Though modest in size and rendered with pastel and charcoal rather than oil, it carries the same emotional weight as the larger works perhaps even more distilled
The figure is outlined only by inference the face emerges from the electric blues and smudged shadows as if caught mid-dissolve. There is no clear line, yet there is form. The result is not a portrait, but an apparition: someone illuminated not by light, but by memory or loss.
The vivid cobalt blue, which dominates the piece, is among the artist’s proudest moments in tone. It hums with life unnatural, luminous — and yet it holds within it the stillness of grief. The expression is ambiguous, but unmistakably human. A loneliness veiled in neon.
The technique is unlabored, intuitive the drawing began without plan and stopped without conclusion. What remains is a gesture. A half-forgotten dream of someone not quite remembered, but never fully lost.
This is not the face of someone seen. It is the face of something felt
Confusion Series
Pastel and charcoal on paper, 20 × 30 cm each Drawn in Oslo, August 2019
Drawn over a short but turbulent span in August 2019, the Confusion Series comprises ten works made in quick succession not with plan, but with pressure. Each piece arose like a fragment torn from the mind’s edge: archetypal, emotional, unfiltered. Together, they form a broken procession of images caught between dream, myth, and memory.
There is no single narrative — yet a story unfolds. From the opening Portrait (Man) to the final Church, the works trace a descent into a collective unconscious: war, death, grief, ritual, and ultimately the sacred. These are not drawings in the traditional sense. They are glimpses as if someone were remembering backwards, from the end of something toward its unknowable origin.
Rendered in pastel and charcoal, the forms oscillate between line and blur. Identity emerges and vanishes in the same breath. Human figures are present, but they are not portraits they are vessels. What they hold is unresolved. Expression is fractured. Gesture is everything.
The series was never titled at the time of creation. Only later in naming the drawings did the word Confusion appear. It was not chosen to diminish the works, but to honor their rawness. Confusion not as disorder, but as the sacred state before clarity. The state in which feeling arrives.
These are the drawings of someone searching. And in the search itself, something true appears.
A face floats in from memory It is not fully human, not fully gone. The mouth is lost in motion or grief. The eyes are dark, half-seeing. The first gesture of the series the moment where identity emerges in confusion.
2. War
The most violent image in the series A blur of limbs, mouths, weapons, or cries. The line is fast, aggressive, panicked. There is no narrative only the aftermath of something that has already broken.
3. Death
The figure is still, yet wide-eyed A body? A witness? A soul? The marks around the face form a kind of halo or cage it’s unclear which. What we see may not be the end of life, but the moment after recognition.
1. Portrait (Man)
A fish hangs suspended in the middle of the page, caught between form and gesture. It’s not clear whether it is swimming or displayed, floating or falling The eyes are blank There is something ritualistic here like an offering, or a vision half-remembered from folklore or dream. The body is outlined quickly, then forgotten A symbol in passing
5.
The bird stretches wide or is being stretched. Its wings veer toward crucifixion, but there is no violence. The body is skeletal, raw, ancient Like a cave drawing Like something pulled from a ruin. It is both flight and sacrifice. Spirit, caught mid-transition.
A hand points. But not at anything. It is the gesture itself that matters the accusation, the naming, or maybe the doubt The figure seems to lean backward, afraid of its own action. This is the most human of the ten drawings: a moment of decision, suspended forever.
4. Fish
6. Finger
Bird
A vertical division. A gateway. A place not entered, only glimpsed. The structure is architectural, almost sacred but broken The central figure (or void) is blocked, veiled, or absent. It evokes the Orthodox iconostasis, where icons separate the earthly from the divine. But here the icons are missing What remains is the silence between
This is perhaps the most intimate of the ten. A female figure sits or leans forward. The face is obscured, turned away, or consumed She is alone, but not passive There’s tension in the lines restraint, resignation, or inner pressure. It’s unclear if she is shielding herself or collapsing. But she is watching And she is still here
A crowd without identity. Heads stacked, side by side, but no eyes meet. This is not a gathering it’s a presence. The mass of it is spiritual, not social A gathering of souls Of voices not heard. Of faces remembered but not named. A soft wall of memory, or mourning.
7. Altar (Iconostasis)
8. Woman
9. People
10. Church
Pastel and charcoal on paper, 20 × 30 cm
Drawn in Oslo, August 2019
The final drawing in the Confusion Series is not dramatic. It stands in silence, like a memory of structure. A faint outline of a church cross-topped, blurred emerges through the dark. There are no people. No doors. No ground. Just the trace of a sacred building seen through a storm or a dream.
It feels less like a church itself and more like the idea of one fading, flickering, half-forgotten. Not an anchor, but a ghost of one.
After war, after death, after the altar and the people — this is what remains: a shape. A symbol. A silence.
Orphans
Charcoal on paper, 20 × 30 cm
Drawn in Oslo, October 2019
Drawn shortly after the Confusion Series, Orphans feels like an echo quieter, more intimate, but still haunted by the same inner turbulence. Where the earlier works moved through archetype and ritual, this piece pauses. It is not part of the ten, yet it belongs nearby, like a fragment left behind after the story ended.
Two figures emerge in the frame, drawn in heavy charcoal and shadow. Their forms are childlike, but not innocent. The posture is uncertain — clinging, waiting, or simply present. One seems to lean on the other, or vanish into them. It is unclear whether they are two or one, separate or blurred. The space around them is undefined. There is no background. Just the suggestion of breath and the absence of belonging
The title was given later Orphans. And it fits. Not just children without parents, but beings without place, without claim. It is a drawing of attachment in its rawest form: the longing for closeness in a world that has turned away.
There is no gesture of hope here, and yet the lines are tender. In their stillness, the figures hold each other. That is all. That is everything.
Postludium
These early drawings carry grief without spectacle. They do not perform sadness they live with it, quietly.
In fragments, shadows, gestures, they reach not for clarity, but for presence.
And in that reaching, they begin to form a language: one not yet spoken, but already known.
De Profundis
Mixed media on cotton paper (oil pastel, pastel, charcoal, ink)
30 × 40 cm each
Drawn in Oslo, November 2022
Created in November 2022, the De Profundis series gathers four works into a single movement not linear, but emotional. They were not planned as a sequence, yet they belong together, like the stations of a spiritual cycle: emergence, struggle, recognition, and transcendence.
Drawn in mixed technique oil pastel, pastel, charcoal, and ink the pieces merge density with fragility. The paper is heavy, the gestures immediate Color appears like breath: sudden, raw, holy. The figures rise not from structure, but from pressure internal, unseen.
The title De Profundis (Latin: “from the depths”) is not a cry of despair, but a witness of transformation. Each drawing marks an act of surfacing: from grief, from memory, from silence. They do not describe suffering They rise from it
A body dissolves into light. The figure is barely visible, but there is a softness to the form a stillness that radiates from within. There is no obvious glow, yet the surface feels illuminated The arms extend upward, not in praise, but in surrender. Lux Aeterna eternal light is not presented as reward, but as release. This is not the end. This is the soft afterimage of endurance
A figure begins to appear rising out of shadow like a creature not yet named. It is upright but unfinished, spectral but grounded. The lines are soft, as if the form is being coaxed into existence. There is no face, only presence. This is not creation in celebration this is formation as tension. The body of something becoming.
1. Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light)
2. Formatio (Formation)
The figure lifts. Light begins to gather behind the head, and the lines surge upward not in escape, but in return. There is grace in the posture, but also strain. Ascensio is not triumph. It is effort A soul finding its direction again, body still shaking with memory. This is the moment between no longer beneath, not yet beyond.
The body is unveiled no longer forming, no longer rising, simply present. Head tilted, eyes closed or hollowed, arms resting. There is no gesture, only being. Ecce Homo not an accusation, not a plea, but a silent affirmation: This is the one who has endured. This is not the end of the story, but the point at which nothing more must be said.
4. Ecce Homo (Behold the Man)
Postludium
for De Profundis
These drawings do not conclude they echo. Each piece begins in shadow, but none ends in despair. They rise not from clarity, but from compulsion — from the need to trace something seen only inwardly: the ghost of a memory, the shape of a prayer, a silence too weighty for speech.
If there is pain, it is dignified.
If there is beauty, it is fractured but no less luminous for that.
De Profundis is not about redemption, but recognition: the act of facing the interior abyss and letting the hand move anyway.
These are not studies. They are survivals.
Leviathan
Mixed media on cotton paper (oil pastel, pastel, charcoal, ink)
30 × 40 cm
Drawn in Oslo, January 2023
A massive form lies diagonally across the paper — heavy, solemn, still. It is not rendered in detail, but its presence is clear: a whale. A body stranded. The ocean is gone, replaced by blank space. There is no horizon, only absence. And in that absence, Leviathan waits not in pain, but in impossible stillness.
It is unclear whether the creature is dead, sleeping, or simply stuck. Its mass seems almost gentle, resigned. The image holds grief, but not despair. A silence larger than language.
Above the whale or within it floats a strange yellow shape. Birdlike. Childlike. Almost ridiculous. Yet it ascends. It offers a kind of answer: lightness after the weight. A breath offered on behalf of something that cannot speak.
This is not a painting of an event. It is a vision. Of immensity made still. Of breath after silence. Of something holy, beached and becoming air.
Usnivanja
(The Moment Before Sleep)
Oil on canvas, 180 × 120 cm
Painted in Oslo, June 2024
Inspired by the poem and choral-orchestral work “Usnivanja” (2003–2023)
This is the most expansive canvas in Puhalac’s body of work not only in size, but in emotional and spiritual scope. Inspired by a poem written in 2003 and later developed into a choralorchestral composition, Usnivanja is a meditation on longing, femininity, memory, and the sacred.
The painting does not illustrate the poem it listens to it. Where the text moves between dream and intimacy, the canvas responds with golds, earths, whites, and veils of pigment. A central form rises feminine, mythic, almost votive. She is not clearly drawn, yet she is fully present. Woman, muse, angel, beloved a vessel of warmth and mystery
The brushwork is open, layered, and reverent. It evokes religious painting without imitation. There are no halos, no narrative. But there is stillness, illumination, and tenderness. This is not icon. It is invocation.
Usnivanja is not about sleep
It is about the moment before surrender when memory, desire, music, and breath become one gesture.
Usnivanja
Valjevo, 10.03.2003
Poem by Vladimir Puhalac
IIUsta puna slatke varke, Ruke nemirne i žarke, Ponor i plamen u sred oka nosi…
Kad bezdanom odiše, Slušam kako diše
I nemirno sanja
Umiri se onda
kad se nekog seti
Da je hrabri;
Da je bodri,
Da je voli!
Lips full of sweet deceit, Restless hands, burning with desire. A flame and a chasm in the midst of her eye…
She breathes like depths unending, and I I listen.
To her breath, to the dream that will not still.
She finds her calm only when she remembers one who once gave her courage, who stood beside her, who loved her II
To ona mene možda sniva
Kad rukom jastuk miluje nežno
Tad brižno je ljubim I šapatom kažem da je volim.
III
Sjajem zanesen
I mesecom slep!
Volim i sanjam
Jedino nju!
(Koja mi ukrade misli i izmami sve…)
Volim joj ruke, Volim joj kosu, I varljiva usta
koja mi slasne reči govore mazno, da me voli snažno
Dal’ me laže ili ne — ko to zna?!
Perhaps she dreams of me, when her hand moves gently across the pillow
Then I kiss her softly, and whisper that I love her.
III
Dazzled by her glow, blinded by the moon
I love and dream only of her
(She who steals my thoughts and draws all from me )
I love her hands, I love her hair, and her treacherous lips that murmur sweet things tenderly, telling me she loves me fiercely.
Whether she lies to me or not who can say?
These works were never planned. They happened.
In quiet, in chaos, in longing, in absence. I didn’t paint to become a painter. I painted to stay in the room.
Thank you for sitting with them.
In memory of all that cannot be said.
Oslo, 2025
