THE OCCASIONAL NOTE

Fifteen years of active life of one gallery – it is already a furrow! It was “plowed” and cultivated by many creative people. One among them is also Duško Vernački: in his own way – gallery-like, selecting, culturological – promoting as well. A gallery owner is an important fellow-travelling party of painting. He is an important band between the eye, the visual-art admirer/purchaser, and the author of the work, the painter. A gallery owner creates the atmosphere around the art of painting, too. Sometimes he is just a momentary mirror of the most interesting that is going on in the present time concerning the art of painting. And sometimes he is a receptive mirror which reflects the permanent values from the past holdings. In behalf of the future. The heterogeneous generations and colorful visual-art stylistics have passed in review through the gallery VERNISSAGE in the last ten years. And it is good: diversity makes an exciting aesthetic and time unity. It appeals and refers to freedom. To an unreserved appreciation of the visual contrasts and individuality. I won’t list the names of the books/memo pads which informatively and splitly speak in its ten-year-old language. The art of painting would limp without a gallery owner and galleries. That is a necessary show-window to the eye of an observer. Something like a reading room and a library for a reader. Remember the unhappy and ingenious lonesome man – Van GOGH: what touching things hasn’t he done to get into any Paris salon, gallery! Just to be seen! To get a reference for his Work. And he didn’t manage it on a regular basis. In such a way one epochal Work stayed in front of the door of disfavor and it had to wait for the centennial critics and gallery-like enlightenment! Not to mention how many eyes and souls were stinted in beauty! Today things are better although the secrets of understanding art are still “making their wars”… Duško Vernački truly loves art of painting and painters. He also has a touching feeling of awe for the PAINTING. And those are highly important corner stones that hold the house called GALLERY. If it were not for that amorous charge he would hardly endure: he would become dryasdust dealer! The gallery VERNISSAGE wants to write out a beautiful documentary and cultural trail in time. 100 exhibitions prove that, too…Let him endure in the future! Inspite of the tough and often insensitive times! I believe he will. Because Croatian – and other – painting is a garden of the miraculous and inspiring. Of traditionally valorized and of that which is coming and is – innovative. May the generations and painting descriptions be connected and may they cross themselves futhermore. And may Duško continue to stand forward and look with curiosity – who is that new coming master! From afar or from near. The young man or the old man. To art it doesn’t matter at all: it is important that the authentic painters and characters enter the GALLERY…

Branislav Glumac

…Over the decade work the gallery “Vernissage” has presented to the Osijek audience the outstanding regional phenomena and personalities that have been verified on national level. We can say that a real small anthology of modern and contemporary Croatian art of painting has passed in review through its rooms, starting with (now already deceased) doyen Murtić, Prica and Šebalj, continuing with alive classics of older and middle generations, and ending with the series of young painters of different orientations and poetics, but loyal to the technics and the background of two-dimensional suggestions of space and signs. Although the current art of painting often and willingly goes outside lawfulness of frame and syntax of painted stains and surfaces, a painterly take can still be and is a privileged medium of an imaginary realisation. A painting in the hands of a master is still an instrument that emits tones and brings about the harmony of an irreplaceable and specific quality. Therefore, the numerous last exhibitors of the gallery “Vernissage” have the meaning of the tradition keepers and creators of the original art worlds, which gives the meaning and the need for its futher activity.

Tonko Maroević