"Life is a Journey / Život je putovanje" translation in English

 

Life is a Journey/ Život je putovanje

 

Boris Novak is a Dutch artist, Croatian-Czech origin who has more than three decades of work and very diverse work accomplished in a series of stages through multiple techniques and media. After formal education, graphic designer, Boris success goes back to the field of photography and this exhibition is a special way back to its original artistic expression - painting.

 Inspired by Master Radovan's portal, but not in the thematic and formal terms rather in place as a symbolic transition from profane to sacred, external to internal, known to the unknown, Boris creates art installation entitled "Life is a Journey."

 As the symbolism of doors, especially doors to temples representing the encounter with the beyond and go over the threshold, on a deeper level, is to enter into communion with the sacred as the artist invites us to "cross the threshold" and plunge into the adventure back into the primordial state, the state re- birth.

 Stepping forward out of the traditional gallery-gramme for the presentation of papers, Boris causes visitors to take an active participation in the perception of art. 

 Entering the cube set in the first exhibition room, the visitor enters the process of incubation in the religious sense, ie in the process of staying in the temple ritual.

 In this context, the "temple" is actually the uterus, the place of conception, alchemic crucible in which the mate-spiritual and material well transmute into a unique form of life. The belief that a return to the womb a prerequisite for the regeneration and immortality is contained in the symbolism of the uterus is closely linked to the creation, fertility, nature, spiritual renewal ...

Therefore, it is the visitor's "task" in the ritual of "temple" "fertilize picture with the light," with one of the twelve hand-lamps is the enlighteing, breathe-in the life and through associative miniatures experience the cycle of creating new life ..... because the mind and the arts is a kind of travel, a creative adventure where sometimes everything has to go back to the beginning to begin again and continue what has already been passed in the successful development of the sequence.

 Exiting the cube to another room of the exhibition, the visitor is virtually born in the idyllic area of simulated Garden of Eden. Passing through the olive trees (again, the symbolism is clear!) "Encounters" with the first parents, Adam and Eve displayed in the artist's way. As the almighty created man "in his image, after our likeness .." so does Boris, Adam and Eve art created on the model of himself and his lifelong companion. But the message is not retained on a formal level.

 It is much deeper and speaks to the relationship of love and passion and relationship misunderstandings, distance, conflict, self-sufficiency and even death. Views of Adam and Eve represent the universal principle of male and female, two polarities, which divided the physical level longingly aspire to the whole, the return oneness. In this principle is reflected in every one of us a just recognition of themselves and their lives in the displayed artwork is the ultimate meaning and purpose of this interesting art work.
 

Daniela Kontić-Strojan

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