She's an artist who explores the very being and its essence. She has a story for each represented character. She almost synesthetically breathes in the breath of life into them, by introducing color, shape, word and sound. She creates a living painting. In her series of paintings, the artist strives for harmony through allegorical performance, by contemplating the moment, by examining the phenomenon of enlightenment, with monumentality as a way of communication and finally with philanthropy as a forgotten skill.
Deeply intuitive, the author simultaneously empowers and exposes her creatures, by placing them in the depths. To attain that, she uses the darkest tones of blue.
Symbolically, blue is the color of intellect, spirituality and introspection. By using only the color blue, the author brings about depth, timelessness, universality and a metaphysical dimension that erases space and time. The primordial and ancient archetypes, found in the past and in the archaic, are fused with a being of the future a new, strong and wise one that will incarnate as the best version of the self.
Every creature that we see before us, was born from a source, from an idea and from a vision. It is of gigantic proportions and is androgynous in appearance. It is part of the universe, but at the same time it carries the entire universe in the gaze of its eyes or in the position of its body.
“According to some myths, both the Universe and the Primordial Human were created from Light, therefore basically they are Light themselves. Another tradition explains how a transformation of Light People into ordinary people, as they exist on Earth, took place. In the beginning, people were sexless and had no sexual desires,they had the Light in them and they radiated. The sun and the moon did not exist”.¹
With the awakening of the sexual drive and the creation of the sexes, the light that people carried within was extinguished. It disappeared from the planer Earth, and the Sun and the Moon appeared in the sky. Ivona takes us a step back by invoking the light back to the Earth through creation of a perfect, universal creature.
The dazzling light that shines through these beings would not be visible in all its power without the depth, the darkness and the introspective withdrawal. Ivona is a painter of awakening All angels who emerge from the darkness experience growth, spiritual realization and an encounter with their own self which is an ultimate reality. The phenomenon of a mystical light is of the artist's particular interest. She achieves another form of communication on a non - verbal, spiritual level through profane art based on personal spirituality
Mirča Elijade, Mefistofeles i Androgin, translation Slavica Miletić, (Belgrade: Gradac, 1996), 29.
The series of paintings, the "Birth of Light" was painted after the "Children of the Sun" series. It is important to note that "Children of the Sun" series represents Ivona's utopian vision of a better world, which comes after the prediction of numerous cataclysms that immediately precede prosperity and a new era. This can be phenomenologically identified with numerous myths and spiritual beliefs.
“According to one legend (...) since the world was destroyed, only lustrous beings remained in it (...) they had ethereal bodies and flew through the air radiating their own light and they lived eternally”.2
Ivona's works are not typical portraits. They are complex studies of a soul that one can hear and feel, and whose physicality demands study and dedication. The artist relies only on an iconic representation that provides strength and peace with its dimensions. Her beings carry cosmic love within them.
In one of his novels, which is at the same time one of the most significant literary works dealing with the theme of androgyny, Balzac presents a perfect, sublime being an allegory of seraphim's love. It is solitary, melancholic, erudite, and both men and women fall in love with it because it represents a perfect, "complete creature." In the poem "Words of Stalker", Tarkovsky indicates that weakness is a good thing, while strength is nothing.
„When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win”. 21
These giant creatures personify the freshness of existence and the purity and vulnerability of a time newborn. They are frail, there are no traces of hardness, ossification or roughness caused by t and experience. Ivona has six segments on display. She seeks to bring us back to the beginning and to show the tenderness from which we have emerged into the world-which has changed us subsequently. She takes off all the armor that a human being has created in order to protect itself and survive. She shows the essence the love and
tenderness that are at the core of each of us. Through her anthropological and philanthropic approach, she gives ordinary human beings the strength of divine, heavenly creatures, presenting them as primordial creations that possess both sexes, emotion and reason. By visualizing the spiritual and the literal awakening of life, the artist implies the power of tenderness required to bring forth the light of a complete being
* Mirča Elijade, Mefistofeles i Androgin, translation Slavica Miletić, (Belgrade: Gradac, 1996), 21.