The magic and joy of playing

Hue over hue or Amigalda's triumph

The paintings destroyed in the war 1991-92

Insted of an epilogue Josip Skerlj's rondo

TALES from the Mediterranean

( dubrovnik ) Album

Josip Škerljis a passionate hedonist, a playful Mediterranean ready to face the unpredictability of the game and the risks of the adventure. That is why we have never (and never could have) been indifferent and cool to his painting, that juicy, deep colour and the characteristic deformation and stylization of the form.

His sudden, peculiar  counterpoints, his most often unusual rapture and the freedom of painting taken very personally soaked with sense and emotion can repel one, or, exactly for the liberated inspiration and paradoxical declensions, as with his intuitive magical  feverishness, imagination and poetics (and the joy of playing, of course) and make one related to his work. For, it does not go just for the formal structure of Škerlj s painting idiom or for his myth-bearing, elevated speech and the ecstatic call of the depicted reality, either; it goes for a moral compomemt offered by his painting:the a moral component offered by his painting: the epigrammatic sharpness of his poetic inspiration (and zeal) warns and teaches us to be human beings, real people of soul pure and open to goodness that will unlock many doors and take us to the most remote (omnipotent) realm of Beauty, as well as to the place where we can rejoice life and fulfill our own selves.

The spark of his native environment rekindles the fires of his messages.Not by chance: before his fires of his messages. Not by chance:before his own dilemmas, suspicions, enthusiams or his catharses, or about those general moments of man s behaviour, acting and circumstances alike.

His hedonism and poetic charge grow like an Antes from his native topos and relations, same as the exuberant metaphor by which he, like Virgil, guides us through his imagination.

Between darkness and light there is a long and winding road, as unpredictable as a poetic roulette; with no reliable signposts or precise codes to read the way literally. Yet all the poetic sparkles and layers peeled off, there remains a deep wish one could solidify and reconfirm one s own identity with, also a process of an artistic idiom that selects and emphasizes

autobiographic, steadfast, sensitive and ethical points and messages. And they breed by most in the golden ray of the Dubrovnik sunray - Škerlj s entire painting universe is infallibly dyed with Dubrovnik and its cultural, historic and civilizational sensations (and reflexes).

Dubrovnik is his primordial element and his existence. That is what makes his excited strolls through Dubrovnik and its suburbs, apologies, commentaries or negations included, so convincing, so juicy.

Insisting on and reaffirming the universal human truths and the general mains of man s existence, the deep emotional swirls and the cultural values that make life worth the joy, then especially the responsibility, love and friendship, together with obvious Eros (quavering in the mythical clash of sexws), emphasized are here through an indication of the autochtonous cultural values, a urbane flash and the genuineness offered by the city and which the painter recognizes and selects or, better say, can knead into a sensibility and the spiritual substantiality as sine qua non-s of his artistic contribution.

Dubrovnik, its population and their relations,events, dooms, grow into unavoidable heroes of Škerlj s enchanted tales.How could they not grow? Dubrovnik is not only Škerlj s basic element and his existence, but alsno his love and his destiny, the magic shell in which he bathes with pearls always and anew; Dubrovnik to him is the reliable equipoise and the enchanted mirror in which he constantly looks at himself, measuring, not as a detainee of his (for some) fatal attraction, but as its poet, a chranicler, a walker and a dreamer capable of scanning the endlessness of its many faces and relations and of telling a tale of each, a tale strong, impressive in a cathartic expressiveness.

Yet his most wonderful weapon is a stylized life with figures not of a known identity, but of symbolic ¨gimmicks¨ that build u0p the substance of fictive and suggested illusion. Details are worked out to utmost essentials, with imagination, might, whirling and transparent, still undisintanglaby woven into an idiom which, exciting and provoking, lasts intensively while feeding on its own self and its vibrating pleats.

The little particulars, not one forgotten or omitted, intensify the idea and verify the motive, while the arising tensions between one man and another, a man and a woman, a man and a city, a man and the nature (or: the growing tensions between cultural desires of an individual -or a group - and the social reality (i.e. of understanding and not - of the social parametres and requirements) revealed and explained is the other side of life, the less pleasurable yet equally decisive one - the everyday drama of living.

Because our own times, like all other times before, carry their own burden of insanity and the uncountable, inevitable contradictions. He therefore aims his artistic are intentionally towards the virginally ideal world of his native Arcadia.

Škerlj s idyllic scenes of the beautiful native land, his leisure, hedonism and the little trifles that make life beautiful oppose the cynicism, morbidity, tension and violence so growing and multiplying in the world of now. The cold world of informatics definition and the ever more demanding technological sophistication is warmed up and rendered human with his playful colour, wide gesture and a direct, liveful, irrepeatable, actually irretrievably needed warm, human communication.

Every move of the brush will impress his peculiar sensibility, and the interaction, interference or strong contrasts make him ready for some service to an organized disorder, he will create an expressively pregnant charge out of a deformation and stylization of the painted forms, or, quite alike, from an energetic tension gutting from the sediments of the heated colour and its complementary clashes,as well as from its resounding completeness and fluffiness created by a busy hand - a staccato of dots and energetic short moves, but also the heavy darkened margins dilute or solidify the consistence of the forms, clusters, planes.

Antun Karaman