<p>Pende likes to expand his visions over large canvases. And his themes are commensurably weighty. One of these is women - for him a very concrete, and hence at the same time figurative, motif. Pende approaches women as an intimate portraitist, investing his models with a whiff of understated melancholy.</p> <p>His other main theme is the sea - breakers crashing on the shore, a rocky coastline, the sky. While this motif remains one of Pende's great constants, it also provides him with a continuum along which to develop his painting style. These works show a marked tendency towards the abstract, while opening our eyes to new dimensions.</p> <p>Izvor Pende's Fleeting Moments</p> <p>If it is true that yearning is a feeling in which the unbearable slowness of passing time is mingled with a vague concept of past and future, then the large format paintings of Izvor Pende are indeed full of yearning, in the very best sense of the word. Yearning and melancholy combine with energy and dynamism to produce complex painterly encounters with the artist's infancy in war torn, wave-lashed Dubrovnik, his student years in Dusseldorf and all the relentlessly magnetic scenes of his childhood.</p> <p>And all this is achieved without ever drifting off into the merely illustrative, the merely narrative. For Pende's paintings show not just what once was, but rather, what still is, and ever shall be. The waves of Dubrovnik, once the backdrop of his early childhood, were the same as ever, even after the warships began bombarding the town; only people's perception of them changed. Looking beneath the surface of Pende's wave paintings, one is shocked to discover that here, horror, suffering and anxiety are intermingled with the laughter of children and with joy. Strickly speaking, all of his paintings are war paintings, for they are expressive of Pende's own struggle on two fronts at once: his struggle with and for his own biography and his struggle with and for painting. </p> <p>His paintings therefore attest to his concentrated quest for the limits of painting's capacity for expression. This quest has long been visualized in two, purportedly separate series of works: Pende's portraits of women and his series of sea paintings. For the artist, however, these two strands are two sides of the same coin. He once said that it makes no difference to him as a painter whether he is working on a sea painting or a portrait of a woman. Nor does he wish to have to choose between abstraction and realism. Besides, any premature labeling of Pende as a figurative painter would be instantly undermined by his own painting technique. For there, where abstract explosions of color congeal into waves, spume and breakers, there where areas of color are cast in a role of wall, sky or sea - there is where it becomes most apparent that the age-old battle between abstraction and realism is of no interest at all to this painter. Which is why his paintings are at their most powerful and their most suggestive in the no-man's land between abstraction and realism. The specific atmosphere of Pende's work is such that one could suspect him of having stirred a magic potion into his paints - a compound made up of nostalgia, color, composition, light and mood. This is the atmosphere conveyed by the recurrent deep blue of the sea, auguring the inexorable approach of night. It is almost as if the sea had mutated into a kind of mindscape, which unlike Gerhard Richter's "Seestucke" derives not from the romantically clouded, but rather from the powerfully clear; Pende's sea is always the sea of his home, his biography, his memories.</p> <p>The blue of the sea and the white of the light are the two antipodes in Pende's palette. This has the effect of immersing his canvases, both the sea paintings and the portraits, in a mysterious atmosphere of indecision and transition, apparent mainly on account of the contrast with the unleashed dynamism of Pende's waves and their freeze-framed motion of his women. Tenacity to what once was, the desire to move on, and affirmation of what is yet to come are perhaps the most striking psychological traits of the women in Pend'es paintings. The seductiveness that Pende's works undoubtedly have feeds on the melancholy mood his women radiate. Indeed, they all appear as if condensed out of this same atmosphere. White, transparent, ghost-like: as beings between two worlds, they are trapped between day and night, between waking and sleeping. And like the breaking waves are more mind than body and as such the thoughts of fleeting moments made image. </p> <p>Izvor Pende lives and works in Dusseldorf and Dubrovnik. </p>