Giusy Uljanic, between  nostalgia and imaginary

An accomplished art, always in evolution, longing for freedom in a vigorous painting

The classical evocation of the human character in the paintings of Giusy Uljanic brings us to the magnificence  of “Arte Bella”, to the everlasting tradition of every art lover ‘s  historical awareness. He is sometimes fascinated by chromatism and discordances of the 20th century  painting, but keeps intact in his deepest feelings the emotion of the naturalistic form, idealized or restored in a spontaneous  realism. Giusy  often indulges on oriental inspired characters, typologies of  imaginary, rather than portraits of  ordinary life  people, even if the features and ornaments are reminding circumstances and situations  of this kind of  life.  Through the  classical  portrait in the distant past and with the help of the grace of characters  of a distant cultural world in the space, Giusy  lives again and brings to life  the charm of a reality that belongs  to the lands of fantasy, memory and dream. So the artist can regain and give back everything that doesn’t belong to her background.  The painting technique is precise and ripe in experience, which is typical of an austere disposition never approximate or uncertain. In spite of the nostalgic inclination, issued from her pictorial choices, there’s no motion of anxiety or restlessness for transiency  as the privileged  classicism immortalized the characters  in forms and colours always repeating  in art from thousand years. Nobody can guess if the painting of Giusy Uljanic will keep in future time the stylistic features of the illustrious classical tradition or if new incentives and other impulses will turn her art towards different directions. As the painting is the nature of the artist, it is possible to predict, without taking  an extreme risk, that possible stylistic metamorphosis  won’t distort too much  her firm style, mirror of an anthropic  and artistic culture  always fond and respectful  of the history  committed to the new generations.

By Enzo Papa 

Giusy Uljanic, one-to-one route between soul and shapening

 Giusy Uljanic’s painting aspect is always deeply imbued by a dynamic soul, soaked by a longing for voyage, every work of hers oozes with a migration feeling, the wish of a somewhere different, both in her works where the movement is due to the choice of the subject and those with an apparently static motif. The artistic project of “Walking girls”, almost an manifesto of individuality, puts forward Giusy’s attitude to visualize her own and all the human beings’ longing to find new places or to rediscover different locations where to find the fulfilment of the eternal universal lack in soul and life. The “elsewhere” is not based in the real world, but in the soul of the painter himself, who pursues aims lying in the deep personality of the artist. Giusy’s portraits and faces are almost every time a representation of subjects which are parts of faraway people and ethnicities, African, Asian, West-American, and the spiritual link between the artist and the exotic subject suggests the ideal of a voyage connecting the painter and the subject fixed on the canvas. Every painting is a metaphor, an allegory of a soul itinerary, something like an ideal and dream, in the purpose to look for faraway lands, different from the physical place where the picture message, both visual and allusive, is realized. In Giusy’s paintings the so called “Gauguin’s syndrome” comes to surface, that is the need to find a remote unknown location on our planet, a utopistic location, always coveted, but impossible to reach because it doesn’t exist. Giusy is looking through his paintings subjects for her existential voyage craved destination, in a more evident way compared to other artists, painters, poets or novelist. The goal of art is always the escape from the clamps of life, the jaws of “here and now” (hic and nnc). Giusy will always paint the escape from the earthly bond, not looking for the transcendent, but it is the restlessness of the everyday life problems of thought.

 By Enzo Papa