CRITICS REVIEW

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CRITICS REVIEW

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Branka Brmbota Radakovich is one of those rare painters who is equalli skilful in painting landscapes, vistas and portraits, or pure air, light or water. While many would be grateful for just a part of that artistic skill, Branka uses her painting ability only as a basic tool to penetrate into the inner worlds of beings, into the universal and timeless strata uncovering the vast distances of misty, dreamlike landscapes. Her painting seems to follow "metaphysical reflection and clairvoyance" (as De Chirico has put it), although imagination is too weak a term to adequately express the fullnes and power of Radakovich's mythical pictures.

She is not trying purposefully to create any special relations between objects. She seems to have stopped trying to do so a long time ago and real objects are almost gone from her paintings. Neither does she use distortion or deformatin as a means of expressing the psychological states she experiences. Rather, she takes us back to our archetypes, to the pictorial preconceptions of our common unconscious being. Even though Branka's work stems from metaphysical and surrealistic painting, such an approach is only beginning of cognition process for her. Her paintings today are paintings of the unconscious, a world in which she moves with sovereign certainity.

It is not by accident that one of the first symbols in her painting was a horse composed of vapour, a cloud-horse, appearing far away on the distant horizon, not, however, as a representative of a Sun-God, but as a part of the energy of the great lunar cycles of regeneration and recreation. A horse, as a symbol of unconscious psychic life, was regarded in certain cultures as a mediator and a guide whose mysterious abilities would help man to step across the threshold of consciousness, or of life. Radakovich's horse might have been exactly that - magical guide, a leader taking her ever deeper and deeper into inner worlds and finally turning into the red horse of the Apocalypse, foreboding war and bloodshed.

Another symbol we often find in her painting is a snail. In Mexican tradition, a snail is connected with the moon. In old Egypt it represented fertility brought by the dead and became an ornament in the process - the ancestor coming back to the Earth, accompanied by soothing storm and rain, to impregnate her. A snail shell is also rich in sexual symbolism, following analogy to the womb, ofter containing an egg - the universal and easily recognizable symbols of the beginning of birth. In many folk legends and traditions, the egg comes after the chaos representing the principle of order. An egg, thus, is not a symbol of birth, but of re-birth. "The egg confirms and urges resurrection, which is not birth, but a return, a repetition." If we look at the painting I called "The Four Riders of the Apocalypse", we shall see a row of snail shells in the foreground dominating over a chaotic landscape from which a ball emerges, a ball which does not radiate its own light, but is rather illuminated by an orange reflection coming from the blood stained riders on top of it.

I see that painting as a prophet's vision of our world's destruction, but also of its renewal and rebirth. The riders of the burning eyes are just a part of some condensed, bloody semblance, and image which will never overpower the pale tissue of the snails - of womb from which we can already see new beings emerging, beings made of sunlight. As in most of her paintings, the upper one, the male, the active one reaches out and leans toward the lower one, toward the female, toward the passive one. The mother precedes the father's world and goes out to meet it, giving birth to the son, who is neither a man nor a man-god, finally but an unreal congruent with his primordial mother's being.

This "salvator macrocosmi" will appear in Branka's paintings as the son that is yet to be born and that will continue to exist even after his disappearance, just like the symbol of alchemy gold. The ways of creative comprehension, along which the painter moves, inevitably lead to alchemical symbols which we recognise in all her paintings - the womb, the egg of the world, or the golden embryo. And, in the long run, they will finally lead to the opening of identical space within a spiritual being - to the opening of the "cave of hart".

Prof. Lidija Tocilj, Zagreb, 1995

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CRITICS REVIEW

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Branka Brmbota Radakovich is one of those rare painters who is equalli skilful in painting landscapes, vistas and portraits, or pure air, light or water. While many would be grateful for just a part of that artistic skill, Branka uses her painting ability only as a basic tool to penetrate into the inner worlds of beings, into the universal and timeless strata uncovering the vast distances of misty, dreamlike landscapes. Her painting seems to follow "metaphysical reflection and clairvoyance" (as De Chirico has put it), although imagination is too weak a term to adequately express the fullnes and power of Radakovich's mythical pictures. She is not trying purposefully to create any special relations between objects. She seems to have stopped trying to do so a long time ago and real objects are almost gone from her paintings. Neither does she use distortion or deformatin as a means of expressing the psychological states she experiences. Rather, she takes us back to our archetypes, to the pictorial preconceptions of our common unconscious being. Even though Branka's work stems from metaphysical and surrealistic painting, such an approach is only beginning of cognition process for her. Her paintings today are paintings of the unconscious, a world in which she moves with sovereign certainity. It is not by accident that one of the first symbols in her painting was a horse composed of vapour, a cloud-horse, appearing far away on the distant horizon, not, however, as a representative of a Sun-God, but as a part of the energy of the great lunar cycles of regeneration and recreation. A horse, as a symbol of unconscious psychic life, was regarded in certain cultures as a mediator and a guide whose mysterious abilities would help man to step across the threshold of consciousness, or of life. Radakovich's horse might have been exactly that - magical guide, a leader taking her ever deeper and deeper into inner worlds and finally turning into the red horse of the Apocalypse, foreboding war and bloodshed. Another symbol we often find in her painting is a snail. In Mexican tradition, a snail is connected with the moon. In old Egypt it represented fertility brought by the dead and became an ornament in the process - the ancestor coming back to the Earth, accompanied by soothing storm and rain, to impregnate her. A snail shell is also rich in sexual symbolism, following analogy to the womb, ofter containing an egg - the universal and easily recognizable symbols of the beginning of birth. In many folk legends and traditions, the egg comes after the chaos representing the principle of order. An egg, thus, is not a symbol of birth, but of re-birth. "The egg confirms and urges resurrection, which is not birth, but a return, a repetition." If we look at the painting I called "The Four Riders of the Apocalypse", we shall see a row of snail shells in the foreground dominating over a chaotic landscape from which a ball emerges, a ball which does not radiate its own light, but is rather illuminated by an orange reflection coming from the blood stained riders on top of it. I see that painting as a prophet's vision of our world's destruction, but also of its renewal and rebirth. The riders of the burning eyes are just a part of some condensed, bloody semblance, and image which will never overpower the pale tissue of the snails - of womb from which we can already see new beings emerging, beings made of sunlight. As in most of her paintings, the upper one, the male, the active one reaches out and leans toward the lower one, toward the female, toward the passive one. The mother precedes the father's world and goes out to meet it, giving birth to the son, who is neither a man nor a man-god, finally but an unreal congruent with his primordial mother's being. This "salvator macrocosmi" will appear in Branka's paintings as the son that is yet to be born and that will continue to exist even after his disappearance, just like the symbol of alchemy gold. The ways of creative comprehension, along which the painter moves, inevitably lead to alchemical symbols which we recognise in all her paintings - the womb, the egg of the world, or the golden embryo. And, in the long run, they will finally lead to the opening of identical space within a spiritual being - to the opening of the "cave of hart". Prof. Lidija Tocilj, Zagreb, 1995