ROBERT SEVER CELEBRITYJI - DalCasa

“Broj 10”, djeca koja se igraju među spomenicima / “Number 10”, children playing between monuments
landscape. While I look at them, I evoke moving images,
just like in some movie: that movement comes
from the memories and can best be described with an
idea by Jorge Luis Borges that all shapes of art aspire
towards music. They simultaneously display, talk and
abstract, while recalling different elements from art history
and reality.”
His large canvases consist of several smaller ones, simply
because he wants to work on big surfaces, and it’s
impossible to bring in a large-sized canvas to his atelier,
which he shares with several other colleagues in
Mesnička Street in Zagreb. One of the recognizable
elements that create the original Vehabović’s style is
also the sand surface of the canvas, as that delivers
the tactile quality to it. Creative impulse, in words of the
artist himself, comes from playing around.
Along with the numerous collective exhibits in which
he has participated, Zlatan Vehabović also presented
himself to the local public in solo manner by throwing
two exhibits that are crucial for the overall evaluation
of his work. Those are the “6 Kilometres” exhibit at the
Student Centre Gallery in Zagreb in 2006, and “North”
at the “Galženica” gallery in Velika Gorica last spring.
Already within “6 Kilometres”, he presented his complete
thematically and technically rounded cycle. In
the words of the artist himself, the canvases were inhabited
with figures that are positioned in certain relations,
and they could be connected with the every-day
images or with the archive of images from the history of
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art. In his newer painting cycle called “North”, the artist
was challenged, as he says himself, by further “turning
the observer’s inner world into motion” by choosing
the motifs and protagonists with the repeated desire to
start the avalanche of individual films.
“True painter already encompasses in himself all those
painters that will come after him”, said Lovro Artuković,
one of the most appreciated contemporary painters,
and he also said that “what materializes within a painting
depends on that special clip of time as much as on
the painter’s ability.” It seems that Vehabović, at his
age of 25, has already gained awareness on painting
as a characteristic that is immanent to him, as something
that he has always possessed and something that
he constantly develops and transforms into this unique
expression that could only belong to him. The Croatian
contemporary art scene is still very much isolated,
which makes the reach of Vehabović’s work, as well as
many of his other art colleagues, to be pretty limited
both geographically and regarding the degree of the
public taking notice of him, and that is connected with
the status that art, especially contemporary art, has
right here and now.
On the other hand, Vehabović is one of those artists with
works that are ideal for collectors and who, probably
completely unconsciously, follows the artistic trends of
the world. He works in a traditional medium – painting,
yet his painting can hardly be compared with something
you’ve seen before, as it is authentic and filled