oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, signed and dated lower left, in red, "M. Detoni (19)72. - VI."

Marijan Detoni displayed his sensibility in a very broad range. He was born in Križevci in 1905, and died in Zagreb in 1981. He exhibited with the Earth group and in that phase painted socially motivated scenes from the lives of workers, from the Croatian province, or from the periphery. Prone to narration by his habit, he created several very successful graphic maps (for example, People from Seine, 1934). After the experiences of World War II and a brief, but significant, episode of social realism, he turns to abstraction. Pre-war engaged narration turns into symbolism. Visions of experiences that he had been abstracting since the Fantasy of the rotten wall from 1938 (today in the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb) after the war turn into complete abstraction (sometimes close to Informel), or expressive figuration. The themes he deals with are sometimes cosmic-poetic, and sometimes a reflection of the human condition. The painting 'Neighbourhood Quarrels' is a symbolic representation of the aggression that erodes human relationships. Broken figures in conflict, and coloristic accents on a predominantly gray background, represent emotional highlights of this dramatic composition. Here too we see Detoni's gift for visual narration, effectively translating events, or some action, into visual language. All the frustrations and hatred that accumulate in a man with tremendous force, the painter has presented here by stylizing human figures as grotesquely grinning dolls. Reducing numerous conflicts (which are full of both history and individual human lives) to a puppet show, for this painter, perhaps had a cathartic function. The direct and caricatural representation of strong, destructive emotions, is the first step towards understanding them, and then mastering them. FG

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