Coloristic richness and airiness of light are constants of the scenery, attractive to artists for artistic transformation independently of the selection of their poetics. Ivana Puljić recognizes the essence of the beauty of a particular landscape, as well as in the view of its attractive points and created by the atmosphere of dear sceneries. It is on adopted clips of the nature suitable for her fine balance between descriptiveness and reduction. Ivana encourages compositional solutions of prevailing verticality lightweight ascent of space, suggesting the concrete touch of imaginary.
Ivana starts from the picturesqueness of her own environment, luminosity of south, but she, also, reflects the fields and hills of other geographical areas. By organizing scenes, views and squaring, Ivana gives to reality dimension of somewhat imaginary, potentiated by playfulness in interpreting details. Extremely important for the experience of her paintings is the structure of the surface, i.e. applied technique.
Ivana Puljić paints with the wax, ancient encaustic, although modified in some aspects of the application. In any case, the structure of the surface, its sensuality caused by colour and imprinted light, gives vibrancy and constant materiality to the landscape. The material itself even in scrunched relief retains, in the character of the surface, initial feeling of fluidity and the heat accumulated in the energy and luminosity of Ivana’s palette. The joy and play, with well-kept talent, led to the realization in the subtle material which in its content layer always carries a spark of a wonder.
Ordinary crowded with fairy tale. The landscapes are not the only motifs that Ivana enriched with imagination. City views (often with quoted monuments) are also staged in the dialogue with dreams, in relation of representative buildings and threads close to the purity of views. Ivana’s boats sail between the coast of imagination and the banks of open sea, without the risks of strong wind since Ivana protected them with the veil of painter’s credibility. Present in variations of the theme, of related and different paintings, a kind of diptych that carries their uniqueness in shift of accent. Visible in an interesting arrangement of artistic components. Ivana very luckily and reasonably balances the clusters of coloured wax, the density of lines (whether summing parallel lines or by their free flow) and segments of unpainted canvas (very artistically active in the fabric of the whole). Paintings under such combinations are weft for artistic formation in which the motif unpretentiousness is a link to the primeval beauty of the Mediterranean and its historicity. The paintings breathe and exude an atmosphere of serenity, gently tremble in every corner. On this track, Ivana Puljić in her poetry includes the values of tradition transformed by modern visual language and a sincere freshness of expression in the atmosphere of serenity. Confirmed by colour when she paints, landscapes, cityscapes, blue sea or sympathetic situation in which there are participants of her story. Creates honestly and artistically impressive.

Stanko Špoljarić

The newest cycle of paintings by the promissing authoress Ivana Puljić from Split, which presents herself for the first time to the Šibenik audience, although being a new share of her liric expression it does make a continuation to a previously began specific investigations and reflections, now already within an extinct gammas of dark or black tonality with blazing coloristic accents.
If we remind ourselves with her graduation at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome (2000), the artist has added to the earlier questionings on silk, jute and cotton, a new cycle of portraits with a predominant narrative expression and alive lyric-expressive charge. In the lap of the liberal incentives of the postmodernism in Rome, with often engaged social contents and predomination of new technological media with very different bringing-about interventions, through a more freely pictorial treatment I. Puljić quickly opens herself to the visual impressions of the light magic of the big city and its countless faces. In a madly poetic imagination, curious searching, but as well purifying of the composition and aspiration for a technical perfection, an almost nomadic spirit finds anew, as it were, a safe asylum.
Interestingly enough, when selecting the material, as being obviously an obsessive dimension in her creative opus, Ivana has reached after a wax, researching its quality, plasticity and origin, but primarily color, to which she has added different pigments and hence, from a more bright and transparent across pastel tones, she has attained to a more dark gammas of blue, red, green and finally dark gray and black layers.
She palpably demonstrates that a persistent and systematic work on the technical-craft’s perfecting can bear fruit to perfection of the lyric experience and refer to the multilayerness of the whole sight.
The urban jam which in the beginning can thrill with its colorfulness and rhythms of the contemporariness has quickly satiated the painter, which prone to silences and tranquil atmospheres turns back from an expressionistic fervency to the small, but for her important things.
The spatial fascination by the vistas and city-squares, by the seethe of life in the eternal Rome, gradually enriches through the investigation of the so called inner life, of ultimately simple quotidian facts, there where a dream, memory, loneliness with abundance of metaphoric connotations dwell.
Subtly and gently the authoress simply calls upon in purified forms certain poetic minimalism, be it street’ lights, lightened windows, ropes with flags, calm city motives, but as well counterpoints of crashed delights and expressive colorist charges.
The investigation of the space and the occupation with métier problems, the different wax layers on the wooden plates, the new insertions of metal scraps with prodigious visual effects (e.g. Tango), are not for Ivana only a heritage of the surroundings but a personal searching, in her vision with a warmth of feelings she wants to appease worlds, with an upheaval of imagination she wants to touch human spiritual landscapes.
If behind the appearance of the paintings by Ivana Puljić one can find traces of the consequences of human loneliness and anguish in the turbulences of the contemporary world, the lyric expression and inversion towards the rich sensual scale has doubtlessly discovered the freed inner impulse of one refined and elegant play.
The persistent work on creating a recognizable signet, which on a conceptual level we experience very emotionally and with strong tones of lyricism, intends an in-depth observation of the world, subtly registering each alteration of it.

Tonći Šitin