Enfer en paradis – Branimir Pešut

Eugene Varzić’s painting, I must admit, follows the Apollonian ideal of the perfect world concept. Every artist, including Varzić, faces the challenge of continuing the artistic present or referring to well-known and accomplished art. Varzić’s art reveals this foundation and uncovers a passion for continuing the ancient project, which is part of the European project that has existed for over two thousand years. The ancient and later Renaissance art have created a perspective that has been the driving force and destiny of many painters due to the unavoidable legacy it carries.

In today’s time, when many artists embrace the exile and asylum of denial and when eschatology is distinctly present through continuous advocacy, discontinuities, and the death of form in contemporary art, Varzić’s pronounced inclination towards figuration and painterly techniques points to its origin in the classical painting tradition. Postmodernism, with its democratic nature and noticeable omission of the main stream, as Baudillard says – everything can be simultaneously retro and contemporary – has allowed a return to classical figurative forms even in a time perceived as the century of abstraction or the end of painting and art itself.

As a younger generation painter, Varzić is undoubtedly less inclined towards theoretical speculations on what painting should or should not be today, and is more guided by artistic eros, that is, emotion – personal artistic passion. His world is more solidly constructed and defined by clear boundaries. Tradition, for him, is not something that invites confrontation but an impulse for a new continuation, a new chapter. Interest in the body and portraiture has long ceased to be a norm; instead, it has become an excess or peculiarity in our contemporary art. Varzić’s painting thrives precisely on the body and form. The artistic techniques he employs, the combination of different methods, unusual painting formats, and the duality of painting-relief are innovations that expand the boundaries of the medium into an unusual synthesis of new meanings from familiar signs and symbols.

The protagonists of his works can be anonymous faces or even Picasso, Parisian squares and parks, citations from classical art, or some photographic source with pronounced raster. Yet, for the subject of his canvases, Varzić also turns to his most intimate family circle – his wife and children are also present.

Eugene Varzić’s painting is bright and optimistic, unburdened by a pathetic rhetoric and gloomy messages. It disregards the trends, ideologies, and sharp tensions that contemporary art encounters today.