An exhibition of paintings by Jadran Lenarčič
Galerija Krka Zdravilišča Strunjan Ljubljana, 2001

THE METAPHORICAL PAINTING WORLD OF JADRAN LENARČIČ – We are rarely given the opportunity to learn about the artistic creativity of scientists: for Jadran Lenarčič, a researcher in the field of robotic kinematics and biomechanics at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and visiting professor at many universities around the world, painting has been an integral part of his life for more than ten years life. Despite the fact that he lives and works in Ljubljana and travels a lot around the world, he remains Mediterranean at heart, and his native environment of Slovenian Istria gives him creative challenges, which he realizes in various techniques into a painterly expression that is recognizable as an author and very intimately expressed. The paintings with acrylic paints and pastels on canvas, exhibited in the Krka exhibition centre in Strunjan, were created in these autumn months, and even the author’s identifiable expression means an important change in the painter’s development in artistic creation.

The canvases are filled with darker lines and selected colours and convey new stories, confessions and messages. With the line as the creator’s most intimate and direct tool, Lenarčič determines the building structure of the composition. Although the line is strictly controlled, it is realized in segments into a spontaneously playful and intuitively relaxed network. We recognize building elements and details that, despite strong stylizations and sometimes deformations, are definitely conditioned by a concrete starting point in coastal architecture and urbanism; only within these forms unobtrusively appear, which, especially in the older works, are associated with certain segments of the human body, while in the most recent ones, the strongly schematized but still recognizable form of a bird is almost indispensable. This motif, with its specific multi-layered symbolism and depicted so many times in the history of art, also becomes an author’s metaphor for Lenarčič, the bearer of a very intimate vision, feeling and message. The external real world, which he has carried inside himself since his youth and now sees and experiences differently, is a momentary impulse in his creative will: he rematerializes it artistically in his own way into line interweaves and signs, which, in their essence of archetypal forms, reflect especially the author’s subconscious, memories, dreams, desires, experiences and thoughts. In the last parts, however, this linear iconographic form, evoked from reality, is subordinated to the colours:

An exhibition of paintings by Jadran Lenarčič
Galerija Krka Zdravilišča Strunjan Ljubljana, 2001

at least apparently, it remains in the background, unobtrusively transpiring through the rich layers of colours. However, they still retain that power in confession, expression and communication, which forces the viewer to search for content and to think, i.e. it does not leave him indifferent.

In the exhibited paintings, colours take on an increasingly dominant role. Compared to the works flooded with yellows created until this summer, he surprises us, especially with sunny reds, to which he adds blues and greens: it seems as if Lenarčič carried light and colourism deep within himself (“genius loci”) and now realized them on the canvas surface. He chooses only certain colour values, which he applies in multiple layers, leaving them transparent, through which an intimate linear narrative discreetly seeps through. Colour areas and forms are thoughtfully arranged, creating the illusion of space and especially the all-important mood and lighting atmosphere. The specific solar warmth of the Mediterranean landscape fills the painting space, and despite the expressive details in the general dynamic linear grid, the images as a whole are full of optimism and calmness, meditatively mysterious in their essence and artistically open at the same time.

The presented paintings of Jadran Lenarčič are therefore intimate artistic interpretations that reflect the sensibility and cosmopolitanism of the scientist of the latest era. However, regardless of the modern way of life and thinking, conditioned by the rapid development of digital technology and robotics, to which the author has devoted himself professionally, he remains primitive givens and values and all that he carries within himself, the highest universe and his style of life, where science and art intertwine equally. Or as he himself said: “Painting is just as free creation as mathematics. There is more freedom in mathematics than you might think. For me, it’s one and the same, painting or working in the field of robotic kinematics”.