Ivo Pervan was born in Split in 1947. Refined sense of touch and delicate shades created from the rich treasury of warm colors and unpredictable mood of the sea are necessary in searching for a suitable sight of Croatian landscape that is the spiritus movens of his work. The photographer, whose posters have won an astounding 7 prizes in world competitions, and who has published 17 and co-published 60 monographs, has made Croatia well-known by his photographs and has eternalized Croatia's beauties.
Ivo Pervan's photographs rule over time. They possess a magical, at certain moments, bizarre force that attracts viewers' eyes to the fogs that move slowly above the water, dusks among the needles of pine trees, sticky like drops of resin hanging from the thick knotty coniferous trunk. The photographs do not let you look away from the raster that he finds through the see-through, fairy lens of his camera in stone structures, water reflections and in the straight stonewalls on the Croatian islands.
Therefore, his photographs sing.
Taken by Pervan's camera, Croatia has the face of stone portals, the eyes of nobly pale windows of aristocrats' houses whose flowers like red lips give the scent in pots with lion heads chiseled beneath glass frames. This is what the steep streets of Lastovo are like when the sleepy, deserted island is awakened by carnival masks and crowds of dressed up characters: white and harmoniously built of stone, red and noisy that came with visitors, all blended into one picture - a photograph by Ivo Pervan.
His Croatia has a dress of purple lavender flowers from Hvar, around its neck is a range of islands of light, of stones, of green pines, islands of sand and the particular island - a lump of lava, while their restless children - waves, play partly roguishly, partly loudly in the change of day and night.
And people? Are they interwoven into scenes or do scenes consist of them? Pervan chooses people who directly feel the soil and from whose palms roll the fruits of their labor. They have hands that know how to make falkusa (wooden row boats), how to kiln-dry cheese in order for it to become golden-yellow, yellow-ripe, ripe-tart, for its look to be as clear as its taste. His people are field-laborers who dig up the vineyard in the morning, cast their fishing nets in the evening, then leaning over the table in the konoba knit tales like knitters from the island of Cres who knit woolen socks used to run to bread ovens that used to be the public property of all villagers, carrying in their aprons hot bread.
Everything in his photographs has a purpose: the chosen form, the imprinted impression and the desired color - chance is overcome by focusing on the right sight, while Croatia through the eyes of Ivo Pervan is beautiful in the simple naturalness of its diversities. | |
