2006. Pilgrimages to the Rocks of Brijuni Islands – “More”

Salty exhibitions: painting with the sea, Veli Brijun Gallery

“Painting with the Sea” by Višnja and Marijan Anić is the unpretentious process of giving shape to a fascination, linking two otherwise opposing realities: elemental nature and sophisticated technology.

Large and wide, deep and open, the sea is far removed from any aesthetic judgement: any possible measure and criteria are lost in the expanse of the ocean and the stretches of the high seas, while in the coastal area, in the bays and coves, in the shoals and shallows, one can establish relationships which might be qualified as harmonious and charming, or dynamic and dramatic.

A painter or a poet, a musician or a photographer, in other words a sensitive soul, will find motifs in the surrounding nature which will encourage him to make choices by affinity, inspire him to some more or less creative response.

If nothing else, the very look itself will frame a characteristic or significant situation, so to say “zoom in” on what, from a profusion of stimuli, most corresponds by affinity or by contrast. The outcome of each stimulating encounter between man and nature finds a correlation for the infinite and the unreachable (that is to say, for cosmic distances) within the limitations of our terrestrial destiny and short-term existence.

Tonko Maroević used these words in the introduction of the “Painting with the Sea” catalogue, trying to get to the bottom of the cycle of the amateur photographers Visnja and Marijan Anić who defined their future through the frame and the camera lens, finding always new sophisticated and amazing structures of the sea surface. The photographs exhibited in the exhibition space of Veli Brijun are the result of tireless pilgrimages along the rocks and cliffs of the archipelago.

The authors Višnja and Marijan Anić have discovered a specific way of capturing the coastal seabed. In their photographs, the details of the sea look like works of art. We have the impression of looking at graphics, watercolours or oils, etc. There were no subsequent interventions in the process, except the usual ones (correcting the consequences of flawed exposure and the like).

The end effect of the photographs primarily depends on the light conditions, such as the position and strength of the sun, on the direction and height of the waves, on the configuration and picturesqueness of the seabed and on the exposure of the camera. One of the characteristics of taking photos in this way is that when selecting motifs through the finder, one cannot see the final picture, and repeated photographing on the same spot frequently gives different results. The fact that the sea has been creating and projecting such pictures for millennia is fascinating.
Only state-of-the-art technology and the position of the photographer allow the freezing of the fraction of a moment and the discovery of the surprising beauty of the sea which has been hidden until now.

“Painting with the Sea” by Višnja and Marijan Anić is an unpretentious process of giving shape to a fascination, linking two otherwise opposing realities: elemental nature and sophisticated technology, all for the purpose of creating an emotional and aesthetic response.

The sea has served as a kind of perpetuum mobile of fascinating pictures, as a generous and gentle transmitter of “positive vibrations”, as an ethereal insight into an abyss and as a mirror of the sun’s beneficial rays. The camera of our authors does not merely capture the epidermis, the skin of the sea surface, but pierces through various layers of diaphanous and flexible matter, creating the suggestion of not only three-dimensionality but also of a widening, spreading and stretching in all directions.