oil on canvas pasted on hardboard, 57 x 75.5 cm, signed lower right, in brown, "F. Šim."

On the gray base with a noticeable white underpainting, lines stand out, edged with dark shadows. Despite the prevailing gray color, a scorching heat, the high sun, and desolation are felt. This is the expression achieved by Frano Šimunović (1908 - 1995) in his paintings of stone walls, or dry walls of Dalmatian Zagora. On the recommendation of his professor, Ljubo Babić, he went to Spain in 1934 to learn from the old masters, including the relationships of light and shadow, in which the classic Spanish painters achieved great subtlety and expression. Traces of this study can be seen in this painting. Description and recognition of landscapes in Šimunović's paintings, I would say, are less important. He transforms the landscape into a universal symbol of human existence. If we also know the reasons why peasants have been constructing stone walls on barren land for centuries (namely, in order to manage to retain a little fertile land in the karst desert where they lived), this existential dimension of Šimunović's paintings becomes even more pronounced. There is also a trace of another lesson from his professor, Ljubo Babić. Babic, indeed, before the Second World War (and that, too, under the influence of Spanish painting), was seeking a characteristic connection between our landscape and painting. The post-war poetics of free abstraction and the then very current existentialist philosophy certainly helped Šimunović's aspirations to transcend space and time and their merging into the painter's symbol of human life, inextricably linked to the concrete climate. FG

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