Atelier & Gallery Ostrman
Tomislav Ostrman’s painting, even at a fleeting glance, leaves an impression of playfulness and creative ease—unquestionably marked by an overarching unpretentiousness. However, all these traits—though undeniably present—form only the surface visual layer within the poetics that this intriguing young artist continually and generously offers us.
Tomislav’s paintings, in fact, are laden with complex symbolic meanings, and as such, they will always pose a kind of riddle, even a small intellectual challenge, to anyone willing and patient enough to study them more closely. Above all, one should note the way Tomislav manages to transform his predominantly geometrically treated forms into concrete content.
He achieves this with utmost simplicity, through the skillful harmonization or translation of circular, three-quarter circular, semicircular, quarter-circular, triangular, rectangular, or striped visual components into figurative compositions, which often take on the characteristics of associative abstraction. Within such compositions, as already mentioned, it is possible to discern a true wealth of hidden iconographic codes.
The main protagonist of Tomislav’s latest painting cycle is a male figure named Fućkalica. He symbolizes joy, childlike playfulness, curiosity, and purity of soul. Reduced to a circle—a perfect form that requires no addition or subtraction—he occasionally features a fully simplified, geometrically treated body. The universal sound of whistling is visualized through floating circles that seem to burst forth from the paintings, while the stripes we occasionally encounter may suggest a regular melodic rhythm. These stripes, however—not by chance—are often blue and white, thus associating with sailors and the navigation tied to them, serving as a paradigm of the стремление toward discovery and understanding of something new and unknown.
In some paintings, Fućkalica is accompanied by his partner, Žveglica. Their love and curiosity do not lead to a destructive act—Žveglica does not follow in the footsteps of her primordial mother and, in the painting Whistle Garden, ultimately chooses to leave the fatal apple unpicked—but instead bring fulfillment and purity, symbolically depicted by their figures gazing at each other across a table that initially held only two empty plates. This is, of course, Romantica—perhaps the most intriguing and revealing painting in the exhibition—which, instead of a canvas, uses a checkered tablecloth as its base, with the figures of Fućkalica and Žveglica later painted onto the empty plates. Spirituality and life’s fulfillment have thus built upon the formal romance depicted by a table set for two.