Izabela Šimunović

Art / Ars

What is your name? Belle d'Eau. That's not a name. It's not, I am a painting. What is the difference? Do not bother.
I lost my way. So much blood, so many dead… All the paths are the same, while I searched and searched. Why did no one tell me where you were, Belle?
I am a painting. I am raspberry, apricot, currant, strawberry, I'm the beginning of a half an hour, I'm pink, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, carmine, rose madder, vermilion. I am an enthusiasm, I am a seriously damaged reality, my scent is like the sparkling sea water, I am the embodied state of grace. I am existence itself, so simply great, like a big black Thing. I need everything. I am the reminiscence of the Garden of Eden. I am the authentic body, the response, the metamorphosis, the horror of the cause.
Again you are in front of me. Now I hold on to you, using a procedure that I have trained by watching, observing. What is your name? Belle d'Eau. Why do you give me so little? Why do I have to guess at your curved spaces? I want to step into your house, Belle. Can you hear? Let down the curtains. Let the morning enter the room. The sky is clear. The dew is hanging on the landscape. Thirty-three times I watched you and thirty-three times I was confused. Why.
I am a You have confused me too much, you've exhausted me exceedingly and still you have not told me who you are. Are you a place in history?
I am what you are looking at and what you do not see. But some do start to see, but have to take their old skin off and take their worn out words off and take a knife to peel greasy thoughts from off their body, blow other people’s proverbs off their bones, thoroughly clear the nose of ordinary pleasantries and, especially, rub the eyes with water that has been seven times borne by people.
You have to watch me without shame and without reservations, what would someone say if you looked with no shame at that of which he is ashamed? Complicated, but liberating.
I am the most beautiful thing in the world, I've been passed from hand to hand, for centuries I've been watched over and handed to those who capable of taking so much without bursting from the beauty. Because there are enough who burst from my weight, and yet they died happy and were not sorry.

From the unpublished writings Conditio Humana

Jakov Radovčić, Museum Adviser

Department of geology and palaeontology

Croatian Natural History Museum, Zagreb

What are the peculiarities that raise a human being as a unique species, species that through creation and the possibility of comprehension the symbols of others can recognize its ethereal universe and head towards the world of metaphysics and beyondness? In the world of nature only the man, Homo sapiens, is the thinking species. Interlacing the experience and the ability of complete imagination, man is in the same time the only symbolic natural being that cognitively acknowledged capabilities of producing a variety of artifacts and formation of different symbols as the major features of his culture and creativity.
What are the secrets of mind frameworks that could be found in the origins and the beginnings of art and what is imprinted in the base of entoptic symbols that are often used by artists and that Izabela used, too? Transcendency, a man striving for transformation to an eternal and the search for a vision of eternity, all these are part of the religious systems inherent in different cultures at all instances of our existence. All of us, in the complexity of our being, constantly experience and relive a number of cosmological, magical and functional fusions through symbolic patterns of the metaphysical message of art.
Izabela Šimunović's art prints are the archetypal impressions of primordial subconsciously contemplating structures that are common to all people - in all spaces and in all levels of phylogenetic or ontogenetic status since stone-aged, prehistoric times, to our modernity. With her genuine sensibility Izabela tended to favour the design of specific, universal symbols as a pure mental messages. Living in the urban contemporary Croatian actuality, Izabela instinctively turned to primal human origins, to the archetype itself as a fundamental art matrix, building patiently through her artistic expression the eternal unique system of pictograms, the universal visual handwriting which is easy to read.
Art can be observed and perceived in terms of its background or from the perspective of different aesthetic principles. Our culture increasingly articulates and transmits itself by visual message that is actually reduced to symbols of the primal archaic and archetypal, primeval art.
Izabela instinctively felt that the return to the archetypal sources of Stone Age art
through the design of simple petroglyph and pictograph perfectly corresponds to the time in which we live, thus she left us a crystal clean and clear

IMPRINTS OF THE SOUL - manuscript that we do understand.

Ian Tattersall

Division of Anthropology

American Museum of Natural History

With the early passing of Izabela Simunovic, the world of art has lost a compelling presence, and a complex study in contrasts. In person Izabela was hugely larger than life: a robustly beautiful woman with a generous and outgoing persona that could fill the largest room. Yet she created mostly small-scale art that is fragile and mysterious, that is deliberately restrained, and that is provocative only at the most subtle of levels. Perhaps even more importantly, the images she so deftly created themselves show a similar intriguing duality. They refer simultaneously to the remotest of pasts, and to the most ethereal of future lives; and they evoke a collective consciousness even as they embody an intensely personal vision. What is more, the spare simplicity of these simultaneously bold and delicate works not only speaks directly to something deep in the viewer's inner self, but also evokes the largest of themes. As a result, while the art of Izabela Simunovic remains anchored in this world, it contrives at the same time to transcend it. This is truly haunting art, accessing the deepest shared recesses of the human spirit in an intensely personal way. How Izabela might have developed her powerful, elegant, and truly individual vision, we will now never know; but no viewer of this retrospective exhibition of her work will fail to be moved by it, and all will be grateful for what she achieved in her short life.