Petar Brajnović
Peter of the Tower
It is a difficult task to write about your own brother. How to put a deep perception and subjective emotions into objective words?
Petar Brajnović is unquestionably a special artist. What makes him special is his unconventional attitude toward work and absence of traits commonly found in contemporary artists, particularly in regard to communication with curators, art critics and galleries, as well as in documentation and presentation of his own work.
Petar’s art has mostly developed away from the eyes of the public; its presentation is rare and documentation sporadic and incomplete. The reason for this is Petar’s focus on important matters and contents, on “living the art”, where he disregards any promotion and presentation.
Those who have had the chance to see a Petar’s exhibition will know what I am talking about. His performance art is deeply lived and convincing. Yes, convincing, that is the word to describe Petar; he is the person to whom you can believe.
Petar’s notion of performance is always consistent. He has never, as far as I know, agreed to re-enactment, a phenomenon that is quite popular lately. Petar is aware that re-enactment is where performance stops and acting begins.
Petar’s act of blowing the horn is imagined as a repetitive call and warning, inspired by Biblical Jericho and angelic horns. He explores primary sounds and archetypes, primordial energy and the essence of matters. Petar has made numerous trumpets and horns, struggling to create a loud and powerful bellow of warning. He does not aestheticize and he does not try to dress anything up; he merely seeks a form that will enable him to render the sharpness of his insight. It is precisely the insight and interpretation of reality that makes Petar so special; he goes deep into the heart of things. His reactions are often direct, without diplomacy and compromise. Perhaps what scares us most is not Petar’s (re)action, but the knowledge of the fact that the world is exactly how he sees it, and the image is not comforting.
Searching for the roots of civilization and trying to reveal the secrets of global forces, Petar has learned Latin, in which he reads and quotes powerful Biblical lines that speak prophetically about our time and future. Petar does not discern past from present; he sees them as a single entity where the problems of humanity are solved at a spiritual level, independent of place and time.
Petar’s energy and ingenuity (I have to call it ingenuity since this word has always been highly appreciated in the history of art, but so many times accredited to wrong people) has been recognized by Željko Kipke, a ludic critic searching for an “artistic charisma”.
Kipke has been keeping record of Petar’s action, performances and constant change of his working spaces. Throughout the years, he had collected a body of materials and created a film titled Peter of the Tower, which will be shown for the first time in the context of Petar’s exhibition at the Golo Brdo Studio.
Tomislav Brajnović
Petar Brajnović
Petar Brajnović was born in 1972. He studied at the School of AppliedArts and Design in Pula and the KABK in Den Haag. He is active as an artist since 1985. He is a member of Croatian Association of Artists based in Zagreb and Pula. He is exhibiting regularly on solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.
He is working in the media of performance, video, sculpture, installation, painting and drawing, he is experimenting with sound.He lives and works in the tower on Golo Brdo near Rovinjsko Selo in Istria.