Memento Mundi 1972/2002 – Gorka Ostojić Cvajner

It is neither arrogant nor boastful to mark three full decades of inhaling, touching, listening, tasting, and observing the magical mystery of life. Varzić does this with sensitivity and gratitude. Almost humbly and almost devoutly. Since time immemorial. Since he can remember. Therefore, this exhibition has become an exhibition of memories and emotions. It is simultaneous and unifying. Temporal and atemporal. Anachronistic and anticipatory, with the unmistakable stamp of this current time. It is a memento mundi. And a memento mori. And Augustine’s “memory of forgetfulness.”

The figurative and narrative artist of pop art provenance today is a poet of metaphysics and symbolism in the painting of memory. He is a skilled user of historical quotes in a historical and environmental context that Poreč has challengingly and directly offered to him. As a motivation and confirmation. With its ancient urbanism… all the way to the reality that haunts us every moment of our urban existence. / Jerica Ziherl in the catalog of the painting colony Riviera, Poreč 2000./. Therefore, Poreč’s urban iconography and historical scenery, with Varzić’s replicas of elements in a repetitive, silent scenario of statics, form the backbone of the exhibition. In this complex and multi-component painterly-sculptural assemblage, the author’s goal is visible. He somewhat conceals himself in a symbiosis of past, present, and new times, but ultimately strives for reconciliation and potential harmony. In that happy and skillful fusion of ethics and aesthetics /Branko Mrkušić, Glas Istre 2001./, Varzić follows his inner rhythm but also the historical heartbeats of the city. He liberates his invention by nourishing himself with urban inventory from the lapidarium, ancient inscriptions of greetings and prayers, fragments of profane and sacred architecture in passing, heraldic signs and symbols of well-known and disappeared Poreč bourgeois families. He combines the technique of shallow or high relief, which he applies as a vertical and horizontal, identically repeated imprint and trace of human or animal presence on the painted canvas. Like a static and symmetrical, yet exciting, wearable series – frieze in a stable compositional scheme.

From juicy, baroque-dense coloration, Varzić moves to a serene palette, tonally elaborating it with values that subtly merge into soft off-white. With the intention of artistically calming and subordinating the message that speaks in favor of the responsibility and conscience of a civilized being, he advocates for a tradition that remembers and does not erase, ultimately leaning towards a memory that respects continuity.

He uses the process of multiplication as a play on one hand but also as a relationship between the conscious and the subconscious on the other. As absence and presence. As being and non-being in the duration of time and space. But at the same time, also as an element of communication that he vitally and optimistically needs like bread. Since he is essentially open and warm, agile and engaged as a creator and promoter, he needs an echo in both cases.

As a catcher of signs of the past, certainly with the sensibility of this time, he has touched upon the inspiration of painting and the credibility of high craftsmanship. For this youthfully round occasion, more than sufficient. All with a simultaneous encouragement and good momentum of the unselfish Poreč Street Artist.