Dance of Life

Evolution of man can be studied from various standpoints. It is an eternal question which is more important: form or matter? Is it enough to observe man's evolution through the development of physical body? Is the development of physical body a consequence of developing and applying new matter under new circumstances? Does man as a whole represent a harmonious blend of form and matter or does each of us create existence on our own? What is the goal of human evolution? Who is an artist? What is a work of art? What is a masterpiece? These are some of the important questions that any citizen in democratic societies is free to ask. The answers are collected patiently, by bravely looking into the world in its entirety and observing it from all sides. Let us try and offer some answers. An artist is a man who leaves marks in the substance of the world, allowing clear water to flow into them and reflect the sky. A masterpiece is great insight over a short period of time. Form without matter is a corpse. Matter without form is useless to man. A work of art is a conscious, often intuitive blend of form and matter. The more harmonious the blend is, the closer the work of art gets to being a masterpiece. Does this have anything to do with man's evolution? Can we offer an answer to the question what the goal of man's evolution is? The goal of man's evolution is to develop consciousness. What is consciousness? Consciousness is a state of being alert to oneself, others and the environment we live in. By comparing works of art from the past we can measure the state of consciousness of people in certain places and in certain times. It does not require much speculation to see that in five hundred years someone will compare the contemporary works of art with those from the Renaissance, antiquity, Egypt, India... What they will deduce from it is something that all those who read this have decide for themselves. From all of the above it follows that to create art is to engage in the extremely responsible work of pushing the wheel of humanity's evolution forward. Do artists only create art? Of course not. All political systems deal with art through various institutions.

Different companies encourage the creation of works of art and finally, individuals who collect art contribute to its enrichment. By stimulating artists to act creatively and dynamically, they add spice to quality of life both on a personal level as well as the level of the environment they live in. Art movements and even individual art pieces have their own stories to tell, often treading the fine line of what is possible. The work Dance of Life also has its own story that we shall try to outline here. Žarko Bošnjak, a seeker of truth, was carried away by the idea that he would uncover the secrets of Pythagoras' tetractys and would one day build it in its original perfection. Since the last tetractys burned down along with Pythagoras' school and it remains unknown whether anyone ever again constructed a new one, this undertaking seemed less and less likely. But as the saying goes, the night is darkest just before the dawn, which proved to be true in this case as well. When the seeker gave up the search after twenty years, he started to draw the calculated measurements and proportions on paper more out of fun than a serious intent. In three years a construction emerged in all its geometrical glory. As it happened, three years later the seeker Žarko ran across a sculptor Krešimir Katušić in the company of some intellectuals. After several conversations in which they attempted to understand the world, the seeker Žarko gave the sculptor Krešimir a model after which he was to make a sculpture as a gift. In a car trunk the model was transported to the sculptor's studio. In creative throes, the sculptor Krešimir was getting closer to the sculpture's concept with each day and finally triumphed over the number three. Tetractys represents the law of the Universe, a child about to be born represents the potential of man and the dancing figure represents a human soul that cloaks itself in the world's matter in the ecstasy of dance, trying to shed light on it. It took Krešimir Katušić two more years of agony and ecstasy to finish this sculpture. Conclusion: The sculptural and spatial installation called Dance of Life is a work of art, a result of incubation and birth that encompasses different national historical mind sets. It was made by tracing the course of exact science and intuitive storms of the sculptor Katušić. When placed in space, it creates a magnetic field. This magnetic field affects each observer by enhancing his alertness, or, in other words, by expanding the field of his consciousness. The sculpture Dance of Life would be best placed in a city among people where it could help turn the heavy wheel of humanity's evolution.

In Zagreb, early summer 2017
Annotation by Toma Nun

I remember Krešimir Katušić as one of the intellectually most curious students. He asked a lot, looking for questions and answers, and never had his fill of sources. He wanted more, ever more, not just more theory, but also various and different mental disciplines, which all had to do with art. He ravenously read everything. Before entering the Academy of Visual Arts, where he studied and graduated sculpture, he spent seventeen years – as he explained to me – studying not only sculpture, but also philosophy, theology, anthropology and anthroposophy, cosmology and cosmogony, mythologies, religions, psychology, biology, history... in short, all the sciences and theories, all the reading materials that are related to man and man's culture, civilization, ambitions, efforts, thirst for knowledge, just like he always thirsted for knowledge. But he was also constantly looking for the reality of man and mankind in all their aspects. In all his sculptural achievements, step by step, he tried to have all his knowledge, awareness and experience “filtered” through matter, that is, through sculpture. Every work is a sort of psychoanalysis, of searching and exploring oneself, asking questions about the man of the world and the universe as a cosmic being, and oneself as such. There is no doubt that his sculptures and art are philosophical. Questions follow one another, and answers are slippery, never definite, but certain conclusions are reached nevertheless. The Dance of Life, the project that is presented here, asks a fundamental question and tries to give an answer in its own artistic manner: how can art show the soul? Allegorically; there is no other way. Sculpture has always used allegory to present abstract notions. Love, the psyche, the soul... how can they be shown? While the psyche is (more) individual, Love and the Soul are more universal. Art has many instances of Amor and Psyche (a sculpture by Antonio Canova); there are innumerable Amors throughout the history of art, and Psyche was wonderfully painted by Bela Csikoš-Sesija, for example. But the Soul? We have not come across this subject yet. Could it be that the soul is unrepresentable? The history of philosophy has talked about it a great deal, ever since the Greeks. Is the soul immortal? Socrates already claimed it was. But if the soul can be found in all living beings, not only humans but also animals and plants, what happens to it when the body dies? When a plant withers, an animal perishes, and a human being dies, they all leave physically. By definition, the soul is inside the body, and every being has a body and a soul. Where do souls go when the body dies? If they are immortal, there must be a huge world of living souls. Believers in reincarnation think that souls travel from one body to another. Others believe that souls die with the bodies they inhabited. There are many hard, mystical, mysterious, philosophical, anthropological, anthroposophical, theological, and theosophical questions, with various and different positions that tickle the imagination. The question is open forever, just like the possible answers. In fact, there is the interesting question of how to make the invisible visible, to quote the title of the book of the famous theorist Boris Groys. This is what, among other things, occupies the thoughts, imagination and spirit of Krešimir Katušić: how to present the unpresentable; I also found myself thinking about whether I ever saw an image of a soul in art, especially sculpture, or – how to make the invisible visible. I don't believe I have. I imagine it as a vibration in matter. It should be a vibration in matter. But as for showing it?! Well, Katušić showed it. During the last seven years, Katušić has been assiduously researching intuitive geometry on the basis of Plato's theory that “knowledge is just memory.” If there is a world of ideas from which we all draw intelligent mental forms, and we are a part of both the material natural world and the spiritual cosmic world, how should we approach the problem of materializing the abstract, the invisible, the soul, and how to reestablish the “lost” contact and actively participate in the universal, which is constantly present, always happening, clearly showing its existence. The entire universe, both the macro-world and the micro-world, is very complex, but if we simplify it to the extreme, we can conclude that everything is set up according to divine laws and order. There are laws: human laws regulating the behavior in this world's everyday social and individual life, natural laws, and divine and God's laws, which regulate the universe. Everything is born and dies, and then is born again. Everything is rhythm and heavenly, divine music, which is also following laws, with Bach's music being the closest to the mathematical, divine order. Art is always about transforming the laws of the universe. The entire universe follows a specific order and laws, which are intelligible or unintelligible to us mere mortals. Every form in the universe is formed according to a geometric order. Pythagoras noted that everything always starts from an idea, and the idea is a number, from geometrical shapes to geometrical bodies. Therefore, forms can be more simple or more complex; in any case, they are inhabited by life with a specific consciousness. The Dance of Life, the sculptural/architectural installation of Krešimir Katušić, tries to show the relation between the micro-cosmos and the macro-cosmos on a symbolic level.

In the artistic project of the architectural/sculptural installation The Dance of Life, the Soul dances in an unbreakable bond with the tetractys and the fetus, the seed of new life in its center. The Soul moves easily within the law, it has mastered it and acts accordingly. The Soul is made of cast aluminum with chiseled folds in the fabric of the coat/cloak/dress it is swathed with. It suggests a composition of subatomic particles which are ordered and unified around a magnetic gravitational force, around a composing axis. Body contours are clearly discernible under the coat/cloak/dress. The knee is in a slight contrapposto, with sides and hips modeled after the old principle of the sphere. It turns in a soft dancing, meditative and fluttering motion. As if the coat/cloak and the robe/fabric cover the body of Venus of Milo, the statue is slightly rotated in the waist, suggesting movement. The soul is, therefore, pure energy. It is accelerated by spiral movement, a powerful imaginary spiral circling of the gathered subatomic particles that get together following a divine law or a physical law of nature. Slight spiral movement – dancing. The face radiates with peace, stability, fulfillment, satisfaction. The dance move is soft, fluttering. The arms are spread but relaxed. The eyes are covered by long eyelashes. The statue has dived into its interior and is meditating now. If it opened its large eyelids, it would have big eyes, just like the ones made by old Egyptians, or by the masters of Byzantine mosaics, eyes looking toward eternity. The gentleness, fleetingness and nimble movements are suggested by light too. Light spreads differently on the shiny aluminum surface, contrasting with shadows from every angle, since one should move, walk around the sculpture to experience its changes. Each vantage point creates a new, different experience of the Soul's realized fluctuation in space. There is the same experience when one gets closer and farther away. It is always present, but it seems to be appearing and disappearing, dancing, moving, being active in our perceptions because it successfully suggests its indestructibility, its eternal existence. It is a symbolic image of man, who is always born again, from times immemorial till today, forever and ever, under the laws of birth and death, forever and ever having a soul in the newly conceived embryo, fetus, and man. The Soul's movement – dance – presents the universal law of living and existence taking place in the universe.

The Soul stands in front of a strange structure. It is the tetractys. The artist tells me that a friend gave him a small model of the tetractys and told him to do with it whatever he likes. He did, and had the idea of creating ''The Dance of Life''. Using corten, a metal employed for architectural structures in Scandinavian countries, which has a brown-red color that is very similar to corrosion, he realized a truly daring neo-constructivist architectural/sculptural installation of a tetractys. None remain today, which means that Katušić made a unique effort to revive it. It is believed that there was one in the Pythagorean school, but it burned down. The tetractys, or the four-sided number, represented the cosmic symbolism of numbers in the Pythagorean system. It has a total of ten points and shows the structure of the decad in the shape of an equilateral triangle. The monad gives birth to the dyad, the third row is a triad, and the fourth a tetrad. The number of points by rows: 1+2+3+4=10. The figure can be endlessly extended downwards; whenever we stop, the number of points in the last row indicates what number in the sequence of natural numbers we stopped at, and the total number of such a figure gives the sum of the natural numbers it encompasses. Taking the numeric expressions of proportions and harmony from music and speech and translating them to the world at large, the Pythagoreans talked about cosmic harmony. They did not just point out the significant role of numbers and their relations in the universe, but went a step further and claimed that things were numbers. Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans believe a number to be composed of even and odd, with even being unlimited and odd being limited – the one is derived from both (because it is even and odd), and the numbers from the one. The whole sky is a number. This indicates that the Pythagoreans had a spatial understanding of numbers – one (monad) is a point, two (dyad) is a line, three (triad) is a surface, and four (tetrad) is a solid body. Therefore, saying that all things are numbers means that all bodies consist of points or units in space, which together make up the number. Basically, a monad is a unit that can be neither created nor destroyed, undifferentiated in itself, with no shaped parts. Since it is fertile, it results in the first pair of primary opposites that initiate any growth. It is the endless dyad, which was occasionally considered by Plato and Aristotle to be nature itself, while Zenon interpreted it as the possibility of endless division, i.e. endless procreation. The triad is interpreted by Plato in Timaeus as the simplest form and constituent part of a being – all beings can be separated into triangles, which would make them the genuine atoms of nature. The separation of a triangle results in lines and points that cannot be combined into beings. The tetrad symbolizes the four basic elements - water, air, fire, and earth – but it was also interpreted as the symbol of seasons, the basic element of melody (tetrachord), the basic geometric body (tetrahedron), and the basic unit of time, since the Olympic Games were held every four years. Pursuant to all that, every material body was to be considered an expression of the number four, just like the tetractys, since it is fourth in the sequence and results from three constituent elements: points, lines and surfaces. A richer division of the tetractys enabled the comparison between the sequences, although Plato considered it better to shorten than widen, since the sum of the first and second row, 4+3, results in 7, which was the example of perfect embodiment.

1+2+3+4+8+9=27. Plato in Timaeus based the musical structure of the soul on this sum. From this, one can derive the fundamental musical proportions 6:8 = 9:12. Ancient and medieval writers recognized the arithmetic and geometric mean of the numbers 6 and 12. There is the arithmetic sequence of sums, the geometric sequence of multiplications, the harmonic sequence = 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, and Fibonacci's sequence – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 (the golden mean). The architectural/sculptural tetractys of Katušić is actually a three-dimensional, spatial golden mean in movement. We see a triangle below, the first large “empty” spatial cube above it, containing a smaller “empty” cube, which in turn contains a third, smallest cube. They are ordered in the structure of a tetractys. The word “empty” actually applies to the situation, where spatial squares are turned “upside-down” in space and positioned in a perfect harmonic and proportional order in their interrelationships. They are ordered according to the divine order created from chaos, or as Saint Augustine would say referring to Solomon's wisdom from the Bible: thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight. The elements of the tetractys are also mobile. They are not mobiles, but they can be moved, fluttering when affected by a mechanical force: more by a gale and less by a breeze. Therefore, it also contains dynamic potential, activity. Even more so because, just like in the (only possible) allegorical image of the Soul, as conceived and realized by Krešimir Katušić, three spatial quadrangles, three spatial cubes, inclined and rotated in space, from the biggest to the smallest, move in a spiral manner; in the dynamic of movement, this is associated with the statue of the Soul in front of itself. Using the knowledge of intuitive geometry, Katušić conceived the tetractys for the story about “The Dance of Life”, and found a middle way between strict geometry – the law – and the intuitive artistic experience through a sculptural structure. His goal was the intuitive creation of a symbolic space through the unity of sculpture and architecture, which he worked on intensely for the last four years. In the process of creating and modeling, he followed two more laws: an inclination to wholeness and an image of spiral movement. The being is born within a world that obeys laws (the construction of the tetractys). It is an embryo, a fetus, a seed, an egg, a potential man, and a future man.

Enes Quien

As I watch this latest work of the sculptor Krešimir Katušić, I happen for the first time to hear music with my eyes. Now, in this very moment, the tones of heavenly galaxies seem to be pouring before me into aluminum and corten. The sounds are full of ellipses, spirals, circles, quadrangles… However, these notes have nothing to do with Bach or Wagner; the entire space is overflowing with Chopin's pure music.

The open arms of the sculpture The Dance of Life introduce me into the game.
I am standing but moving.
I am silent but wanting to sing.

I feel so good in the company of this sculpture. I will have to come here more often.

Enes Kišević

It has been a long time since sculpture ceased to be a self-explanatory, directly readable medium communicating an artistic message. The reason for this, of course, is not the traditional nature of the sculptural medium, but the general state of contemporary artistic practice, where the meaningful horizon of a work of art is neither unique nor a priori normatively prescribed nor simply presented to the senses. The artistic work or event exists and develops in a principally open intertextual space, a universe of signs where the destiny of its semiosis is neither preset nor clear. This does not mean that the work of art is a passive recipient of forced interpretations, but that it actively participates within the existing state of signs and initiates changes, generating new added value, which in principle eludes the author's intention and other forces trying to stabilize its meaning, to give it a purpose within one of the systems of efficient capitalization of goods.

In this context, the intention of Katušić to create a symbolic form that could directly, intuitively, poetically concretely mediate knowledge that is related neither to the contemporary everyday experiences nor to any kind of historical reality, but only to the level of human cognition beyond existence in time – along with the knowledge that still has not lost its universal value despite the long lack of a basis in myth, religion or world view that would turn them into a recognizable narrative part of the collective understanding – seems like a lonely and unpredictable experiment. Is it really possible to find and set up today a currently relevant form which, as Katušić says, “touches the question of the relationships between the human soul, world and universe,” and in the medium of figurative sculpture, no less? At the time when the last big conquest of the transcendental in art – abstraction – represents only the initial chapters of a school overview of modern and contemporary art? At a time, therefore, which is lacking a narrative basis and an adequate visual language?

Krešimir Katušić tries to offer an affirmative answer, acting with neither skepticism nor false self-assuredness. Katušić simply starts from the assumption that it is possible to create a system of universally read, clear symbols, which will mediate between the forgotten but long held knowledge about people and their positions in the natural and spiritual, physical and metaphysical universe. The sculpture, or rather the composition called The Dance of Life, consists of two or at most three elements: a geometric metal structure that looks like a cage, and two organic elements – the figure of a human embryo, protected by the structure like the core in its center and the figure of a grown-up man or woman; actually, a human figure with androgynous features. Placed in an open, exterior space, the composition actually creates a particular scene: the wide gesture of the arms signals the mental state of acceptance and movement towards the viewer; but the figure has turned its back to the structure – it does not communicate with the structure directly, but the structure, which is always behind it, functions as a kind of a statement, opening itself to the viewer's contemplation. The structure itself – with a partly moving skeleton based on the spatial drawing of cubes which, set up diagonally and inside one another, draw an imaginary axis which they ideally circle like floating bodies in space – keeps a sculpture of a human embryo in its center. Even though the combination of a geometrically considered shape and an organic form seems incongruent at first glance, the structure and the embryo are an inseparable conceptual whole. Looking like a cage at first, the structure does not enclose the embryo figure, but protects it; in fact, it could be argued that the embryo, as the symbol of the fundamental proto-element of life, initiates the organization of space around it – the space protects it, but at the same time grows around it in fractals, spreading into a principled infinite, which is ideally assumed by the spiritual dimension of everything that lives. The composition as a whole could be, therefore, interpreted very generally as a dynamic balance of appearance, creation, and acceptance; the geometric structure with the figure of the embryo symbolically denotes the pole where life is conceived and grown, irrevocably changing the constellation of everything that is, and readily adapting to the arrival of the new; on the other side, the human figure turning its back and standing with arms outstretched on the other side of the field, embodies the pole of awareness of a rational, mindful being that actively participates in the events by recognizing, accepting and complementing the reality that goes beyond the bounds of individual existences.

Whether such an interpretation can be generally recognizable today is an open issue. Once it has become part of the urban surroundings and everyday life of the society, which is the expected next step, each work of art, including this sculptural composition, will have to survive the process of inclusion into the complex horizon of understanding, zigzagged by particular interests, marked by value and identity, which can put its holistic interpretation to the test. On the other hand, we should not exclude the possibility of the sculptural composition being accepted and recognized as intimate and inspiring precisely because of such a universalist and fundamentally deeply human symbolic program. One thing is sure: there is basically no safe route in art; since every attempt to please the viewer does not help the long-term survival of the work as artistic value, the initial uncertainty is the fundamental guarantee of productive semiosis, the meaningful performation of the work.

Finally, a few remarks should be dedicated to the formal characteristics of the sculpture and the poetic choice of Katušić. In line with the intention to make his artistic message readable and accessible, Katušić builds a system of easily recognizable shapes; both the organic and the constructivist form belong to the same system of symbolic forms, where they function as pictogram signs or visual metaphors, neutralizing the opposition of the figurative and the abstract, thereby mediating the narrative content that has a speculative philosophical character that naturally avoids any direct, concrete representation. The approach of Katušić, therefore, seems to be calling for a primary symbolization of the world – the possibility to employ art to try to reestablish once again the human reality as universally valid, to take the manifold nature of the historical and contemporary world and sublimate it once again in a timeless, archetypal order of signs.

Standing in front of the artistic composition The Dance of Life means exposing oneself to the unstoppable persuasion of the art object to excitedly open our heart, mind and soul to it, absorbing its dynamic forms that miraculously surface from the artistic being of Krešimir Katičić. On a wider anthropological level, there has been a huge triumph of the nihilism of media technosphere, and now that it seems that man has withdrawn before the onslaught of the ever more aggressive scientific management and technological disposal of all the levels of life and world, this artistic challenge is like another warning that the essentially human has not surrendered to that nihilism forever, nor has it accepted the spiritual devastation of the world. Since the modern epoch has announced processes of all-encompassing deconstruction, trying to strip the creative form of any ontological basis, and leaving the freedom of linguistic/semantic play with no other choice but to dance above the abyss of the nihilistic void, here we can see a fully organized and sensible structure that radiates and reveals the Dance of Life above the playful substance of the ontological fullness of existence. Whatever method we choose to approach this structure in space, and however we try to consider it in the dimension of time, we will feel the inseparability and singularity of its dimensions, which resist the analytical power of the logos and necessarily align with the primordial myth of cosmic theater. But while it is synthetic as a whole, and interiorized as a holistic unit, its aesthetic expression and metaphysical lure allow and demand total freedom of approach, impression and experience, as well as the uncontrolled focus on the suddenly appearing details of its rich corporality. The Dance of Life by Krešimir Katičić will not leave anyone indifferent.

This means not only that everyone will find something for themselves here, but that this miraculous form will make everyone experience the ineffable inner contact of everything with everything else, regardless of their general conditions of reception. In the same way, the soft fluttering of leaves on a nearby tree, the accidental flight of a bird, the blueness of the sky above the playful form of the tetrahexahedron, appears in the spirit of the beholder as a boiling vibration of substance, as the womb and birthplace of invincible life. The big picture of a cosmogony is wonderfully revealed before us, without any intention to make haughty revelations about the secret of Everything; instead, it shows that the cosmic spark of life can be found in every being and every point of seemingly dead matter, and that the light streaming from the darkness of matter turns out to be unexpectedly suitable for interior adoration and intimate experience of the sacred. The Dance of Life informs us that our existence is not a randomly fallen spark of the galactic fire, but that the laws of movement of space and time are subservient to the mysticism of love in the eternal and living heart of the all-encompassing Being. It only has to be joyfully accepted, just like we need to open before the aesthetic of metal structure and metaphysical form, and let it enrich our interior life in a mysterious way, just like it enriches and marks the external time-space of the surroundings. Moreover, the red darkness of the metal tetrahexahedron, with a living fetus of an anthropomorphic creature in its center and a magnificent announcement of the free Man in front of it, lets us know that man and universe are an indissoluble whole and that the anthropic purposefulness of the cosmos cannot be reduced to the cold and dry calculation of the separate scientific logos, but that a deep interior insight must complement its final reach with the endless system and myth of the eternal playfulness of life.

If we fully open ourselves to this work of art, its geometric and anthropomorphic shapes will let us joyfully listen to the exciting whirlwind of playful life in the glory of eternal existence.

Ivan Beš

Religious architecture has long searched for its contemporary visual language, as the spiritual dimension of art (after Courbet's “real allegory”) has been iconographically treated with irony or unrealized, having become its own philosophy. As he merged architecture and visual arts into an architectural sculpture or sculptural installation called The Dance of Life (2016/2017), Krešimir Katušić combined two languages of style; and two world views, the spiritual and the rational. As well as figurative and abstract arts, or traditional (sculpture) and contemporary (installation) artistic media. The Dance of Life consists of a sculpture, an anthropomorphic soul that can be likened to the painted Christian angels before the Baroque: boyish putti, androgynous creatures, neither male nor female, of an ideal age. The self-restrained body spreading its superhuman oversize arms, the stooping head, the downcast eyes, are made of aluminum, a light and bright metal which has been cast and mechanically processed. Slightly elongated proportions and the fabric swathing a not-quite-material body are reminiscent of Mannerist figure serpentinate, but the material properties belong to the modern age of airplanes. Next to it – or rather behind it, looming over it – there is a hanging structure made of a material that has little to do with the history of art, a material derived from engineering just like the notion of “structure”, a dark and dull metal, corten. They are geometrical bodies defined by contours – suggestions of boxes nested inside one another at the angle of 45 degrees, with one tip of the base structure almost touching the ground, but they could be suspended in the void, hanging on a single fixed point. Two parts of the same sculptural installation, a narrative, an activated and passive (embodying the classic dichotomy of action and contemplation) “soul” (W. Busch makes a poet with toothache complain that “my entire soul has shrunk”; but here the soul swells, filling the space around it – considering the states of spiritual life as physical states, with the associative conglomerate of the hollow bodies of the cubes (a spatial drawing) ordered one after another – one behind another. As a projection, the installation is behind the sculpture, slightly displaced from its axis, but still in a relation with it. They share a potential for movement, a kinetic energy at rest. The arm-spreading gesture of the “soul” feels like it will tip the body into gyrating, into a torsion movement around its own axis; its face is made of hemispheres (domes), it has the so-called Gothic eyes, a long strip of hair gathered in a braid falls down its back, pointing to a detail of the shallow relief The Back (a series of four plates created from 1908 to 1931) by Henri Matisse, who cut the limbs of a female nude with a knife into tube-like forms of an increasingly radical degree of stylization and geometry. Here, however, the linear cuts, the cutting of surfaces with a knife, are not done by Katušić on a clay model, but on the finished aluminum sculpture. The installation in the back consists of bodies that potentially should, while hanging in space, start the first gust of wind – from quivering and vibrating to wide swinging like a pendulum.

The potential of movement or hint of movement are discursive pre-verbal or para-verbal aspects of this sculptural installation, which can be infused with various meanings and different levels of recognition according to the principle of interactivity of contemporary works of art. The spread arms that seem to signify (invite to?) the start of a dance (this is reminiscent of the dancers with an even more radical degree of stylization of faces and bodies from the eponymous Matisse's painting Dance I and II from 1909 and 1910; the second version has more intense colors and black contours marking details of the naked bodies of the dancers) of the Madonna recall the pose of the ideal man with the outstretched hands that draw a circle (the idealizing form of the Earthly paradise written into a square, the symbol of the Earth and the rational: here we find it in the spatial quadrangle of the installation) on the pen drawing Homo ad circulum by Leonardo da Vinci (created around 1485); Mario Ceroli “translated” Vinci's drawing into a sculpture (Imbalance, 1967), where the symbolic circles displaying the harmony of human proportions become “dangerous”, hard, transformed into a cage (which is again comparable to the installation part of The Dance of Life). When we come closer, or rather, considering its size, under the installation, we notice that the smallest inner “cage” of the hollow cube has a “nested” organic form – a being, with the body curled up in the position of a fetus, “the potential man which contains the seed but also the egg.” In relation with the character that we decode iconographically as the soul, isn't the child a new soul, the start of a new cycle; is its body the conscience of the soul or the body of the conscience of the soul? We also notice that the points of the cubes are connected with line-thin masses (bars), making up a tesseract, a four-dimensional analogy of three-dimensional cubes, in their multiplicity (non-orientational, which it can be “unwrapped” into, as a perceptive paradox). According to some theories, the use of geometry may result from the state of a being. The so-called “ideal geometry” (Simon Unwin) is a reference system with a mathematical certainty that brings the feeling of stability into a changing world or, in sociological theories, geometry is “social” (Donald Black; one example is dance – the forming of a circle dance). In this sense, the installation has the uterine aspect of protection or refuge. The method of “reading” The Dance of Life shifts from the separate examination of the two parts of the work of art (the technical/scientific and the spiritual) to their convergence, their (trans)historic communication. In fact, The Dance of Life is a work with a conservative theme that is treated in a radical way, as a trigger for one's (beholder's) own existential experience, a conversation with oneself.

Temporarily set up on the lawn in front of the modernist building complex (with a printing plant) of the Croatian Graphic Institute in the industrial zone of the city (on the significantly named Radnička (Workers') Road), The Dance of Life represents a pause in the activities and goings of people and cars around and in front of it, inviting the (random) audience to concentrate and contemplate in the equalization of the space of art and the space of life. Space is an abstract but everyday concept; on Sunday (the holy day), the park of HGZ has some features of the garden of Eden. All the activities have stopped and the quiet is accentuated by the micro-sounds of tree life and birdsong. The silence of art is not only the absence of sound, but also an independent state of feeling and spirit, a silence that watches, listens and knows (according to Juhani Palaasma).

Silva Kalčić

The universe breathes, moves, periodically manifests and falls apart, only to be recreated again. This cycle of endless cycles is a dance, a dance of ideas, of their creation, development, effort, disappearance, and everything all over again. In the domain of man, a being among many, there is the same dance, the same birth, maturation, awareness, effort, conclusion, and departure from the manifested world. The instant of self-awareness of a being and the world it stands in, directly interacting with it, turns this being into an active participant in the dance of life. Within the laws of the universe and its movement, the being/man contains the unawakened potential of what he could be and what he could employ to give himself to the world. In this act of conscious opening, the man is a creation that creates, a tiny part of a large organism. His freedom lies in his self-awareness, obtained through mistakes that bring about experience. And that experience assumes the transformation of the selfsame being. The possibility of man's transformation opens the possibility of his world, his universe, to transform. This beauty of movement, of coming into harmony, unfolds all the time in the entire universe, consequently in man's domain too, as a dialog. This harmonizing movement is “The Dance of Life”.

The imperishable part, enduring forever, is the soul, owned by everyone as the energy with the idea of the being and experience. The soul travels eternally, it travels when manifested inside the man and when it leaves him. From the conception of being, from the fetus and embryo, to the conscious man, it is a long road of efforts. The soul meets itself in these efforts. Once it has become aware of itself as an individual conditioned by the laws of the universe, it accepts the conscious dance, the free dance within the law. This is the Dance of Life.

Krešimir Katušić