oil on board, 54 x 65 cm, signed top left, in black, "Tartaglia"

Research information

The work was exhibited at the retrospective exhibition "Marino Tartaglia" in the Art Pavilion in Zagreb 19.12.1975.-14.1.1976., and was reproduced in the exhibition catalog under catalog number 129 with the title "Laid Bouquet" on page 73.

Marino Tartaglia is a painter of persistent, typically modernist research into the possibilities of form. He was born in Zagreb in 1894, where he also died in 1984. He studied in Florence and Rome, where he came into contact with a tradition of modernism different from that of Middle Europe. Throughout his life, he carried in his artistic activities a desire for a refined pictorial syntax that implies the interrelation of shapes and colors, which transcends the representational function of painting, that is, the representation of motifs. His late works found expression of this desire by condensing motifs almost into unrecognizability, that is, by compressing pure painting energy onto canvases. Their referents in reality (in this case, a bouquet of flowers) are merely incentives to study the laws and possibilities of pure painting language, language by which the world is presented to the viewer in an aesthetically and emotionally more intense way. The central motif of this painting is enigmatic and in constant metamorphosis in front of different views. But, it does not want to present itself as part of reality, but as a different reality, inherent to the art of painting. In such a translation of an object into the elements of painting language, Tartaglia tried to express its aesthetic existence, that is, the place it can occupy in the sensory apparatus of the viewer. For Tartaglia, like for many modernists, art is finding harmonious relations in reality and reproducing them in a certain medium (in his case, in painting). In Tartaglia's late oeuvre, which this painting also belongs to, we see stubborn faith in painting, in its laws and possibilities, to which this artist wanted to subject the world, to ennoble it in his works. FG

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