The Eve exhibition was opened by Tonći Šitin. Joining the artist to speak at the opening was Gerard Denegri, the first honorary consul of France in Split.
The premises of the Alliance Française in Croatia’s coastal city of Split were the venue on the 12th of May for the opening of an exhibition featuring the work of painter Anton Cetin. The Eve exhibition was opened by Tonći Šitin. Joining the artist to speak at the opening was Gerard Denegri, the first honorary consul of France in Split.
Anton Cetín was born in the village of Bojana near Čazma, Croatia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he graduated in the class of professor Marijan Detoni. He later moved to Paris and then to Canada where he lives and works to this day.
Speaking at the opening of the exhibition in Split Mr Šitin noted that, “The birth of Cetin’s Eve motif in the 1960s in Paris and its final shaping in Toronto was for Cetin the discovery of an imaginative figure that he would, as an icon of sorts, never abandon. Eve, and the flower and bird motifs, sublimates the entire chain of symbolism, from the distant connection to the primeval woman, exiled from heaven as a sinner, to the most diverse connotations that continue to give it new attributes. The emphasised subjectivity does not mean that the artist has preserved the Eve figure for his eyes and sentiments alone. She is his reaction to a nearby environment; the outcome of the totality of the artist’s sentiment, which has collated all of his experience to date, an iconography as the fruit of a language of signs and the hand of the artist. In the context of multiculturalism and cultural globalisation, Eve lives pluralistically as a sound or hushed signal; she is incorporated or evoked on psychological or sensual grounds; confusing, seductive, questioning, obsessive, secretive … quite simply viscous.
Finally, one gets the impression that each reincarnation of the Eve figure is once again precisely visualised, that the artist successfully applies a mixed technique to turn everything into a game, to write some sort of visual diary that from the start deviated from the standards of portrait painting and that he finds his forte in a fireworks of colour and a kind of almost masked optimism. Indubitably, this is intimate painting, a stimulation of the unquenchable challenges of the imagination, a projection that offers persistent change, a diversity of living and always new strokes that aim to create in every painting an aesthetic experience to which we would add—grazioso.” (BBF)
Cetin Exhibition in Split
