Davor Vrankić — Tentation d’Éveil — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 16 → March 8, 2014

Tentation d’Éveil (“Wakening Temptation”) is a new solo exhibition by Croatian artist Davor Vrankić.

Born in 1965 in Osijek, Davor Vrankić studied classical engraving and etching at the School of Fine Arts of Sarajevo, before discovering a more conceptual and minimalist approach in Zagreb. Working between Paris, New York and Zagreb for the past 20 years, he has explored continuously the various possibilities offered by lead mine. Often of a large format, the artist’s artworks show an impressive graphic complexity. Composed of a logorrheic flood of thin lines that darken the paper with a remarkable variety of textures, his virtuoso drawings picture figurative and oneiric scenes, taken straight from his endless imagination.

Starting each work without reference pictures nor preliminary sketches, Davor Vrankić launches an assault on the blank page before letting the drawing imposing itself to him. If until now his obsessions had him saturating the space with characters, striving to technical prowesses in the rendering of details and materials, trying to turn our perceptions upside down, the body of work presented at Galerie Da-End unveils a new aspect of his art.

Tension and the uncanny remain present but become implicit, subtler. Davor Vrankić neglects this time the human forms in favor of a more vegetal reign, filled with fanciful beings with abstract contours. He not only reveals an unknown world to us, but also initiates a new relationship between his pencil and the sheet. For the first time, he resists to the temptation of black — this irrepressible desire to go always further in the line, until there is not an ounce of blank paper left, to explore, on the contrary, the crumbling of matter in and through the paper’s whiteness.

A wind of change seems to blow upon Vrankić’s sheets. Forewarning rays of light swamp the space, sculpt the forms and engender metamorphosis to which we assist. The light here is a source of chaos, disintegrating the beings and speeding up their evaporation, but also a source of grace, of spiritual rebirth. Penetrated by daylight, the purified fauna and flora transforms and fertilizes. A new order of the world, freed from the constraint of perception, then appears under the strokes. Softly, the sacred infiltrates the landscape and crosses the bodies. We suddenly wonder if this wakening we witness isn’t that of the artist himself.

More contemplative, the artworks of the exhibition Tentation d’Éveil seem peaceful, at least by all appearances. The paradoxical world they picture, suspended somewhere between the real and the unreal, is the stage of a profound metaphysical questioning.