E maturato il tempo di far considerare, per l'importanza del lavoro d'artista, la figura e le opere di Charles Billich, pittore di origine istriana da molti anni trasferitosi in Australia, mantenendo forti legami con l'Europa e l'America. Un autore che si impone all'attenzione del pubblico e della critica sia per la raffinata professionalita dell'impegno artistico a cui si dedica da venticinque anni, dopo il suo noviziato in arte compiuto nel mondo della danza, sia perché la sua opera rispetta l'equilibrio dell'elemento tecnico e della dimensione intellettuale.
Al servizio della creativita Charles Billich continua nella ricerca estetica con severo e puntiglioso rigore per raggiungere il senso intimo della composizione nelle varie forme a cui la piega secondo le proprie esigenze interiori e secondo le suggestioni esteriori della contemporaneita.
Uomo dal carattere dinamico e infaticabile nel lavoro, che realizza in luoghi capaci di stimolarlo all'introspezione ed alla riflessione, Billich conduce una vita stimolante, nel conforto di amici che condividono i suoi interessi in tutto il mondo. Consapevole di possedere qualita tecniche certamente non comuni, usa questi eccellenti mezzi per ottenere risultati di elevata qualita stilistica, compilando armoniosi segnali estetici nello spazio delle tele e delle carte con effetti di surreale trompe-l'oeil che completa con l'abilita cromatica del grande colorista.
Il nostro tentativo di dare una sitemazione storica al lavoro artistico di Charles Billich mette subito in evidenza come il pittore sia creatore di forme originali e di personali linguaggi, dato fondamentale per avviare una seria verifica del'intero suo operato. L'insieme della produzione di Billich dagli inizi ad oggi ha un tracciato ben delineato nel progressivo sviluppo della ricerca espressiva, senza lacune o mancanze che impediscano di stabilire la trama effettiva su cui si basa la sua invenzione artistica. I suoi soggetti si sono modificati nel tempo sempre coerentemente alla sua personalita complessa e scrupolosa. Gli stessi soggetti piu volte ripetuti in bozzetti, disegni, illustrazioni editoriali e dipinti contituiscono una sintesi omogenea delle varie proposte di una condotta estetica che il tempo ha formulato.
Soltanto quando un livello programmato dal'autore e stato raggiunto con la giusta perfezione formale, tecnica e concettuale, l'artista passa alla tappa successiva sempre comprensibilmente legata alle precedenti. Il dinamismo plastico, le immagini simultanee sui piani del suo dipinto, la percezione cosmica e speziale, la scenografia e la scenotecnica, il macchinismo neofuturista sono componenti della sua produzione nel tempo, ritenendo egli un intervento in arte come operazione di forme e soggetti da collocare sapientemente nello spazio dall'immagine. Per collegare in un unicum creativo le varie situazioni che danno origine al suo status estetico, egli si avvale dall'isolamento contemplativo come condizione determinante per il compimento dell'opera.
I motivi spezialisti subiscono costanti aggiornamenti ma sono sempre tenuti in conto nella formulazione del programma estetico perché le forme geometriche trasferite ad altra dimensione lo hanno sempre affascinato, in quanto assumono significati nuovi, trascendentali, subliminali. Varie sequenze del suo lavoro si basano sulla qualita del colore e su combinazioni o scontri cromatici, con valore assolutamente autonomo e indipendente rispetto alla tradizionale impostazione iconica. Ne risulta che le forme cosi semplificate fanno si che l'attenzione si concentri sulla totalita della composizione.
Il linguaggio formale ed il risvolto tonale di Charles Billich consistono di determinati elementi fra i quali domina il motivo urbano, la citta utopica, la citta immaginaria. Visto come con una lente d'ingrandimento o con un caleidoscopio, il dipinto documenta su tele o muri o fogli i quotidiani simboli della soppravvivenza che, per la concisione delle loro forme cromatiche o per la combinazione dei colori in settori definiti e marcati, risltano estremamente suggestivi. Sono elementi essenziali che potrebbero riprodursi all'infinito in una concatenata serie di variazioni.
Dipingere paesaggi avveniristici, in progress, e per l'artista un fatto di grande emozione per la possibilita di variazioni a cui si prestano penetrando nelle atmosfere, insinuandosi nei climi e negli spazi. Non e certamente da sottovalutare il valore ricreativo di molte opere di Billich la cui norma e che l'arte debba soddisfare esigenze ben precise, non ultima una risposta corroborante alle tensioni dall'esistenza.
Uno sviluppo logico della pittura di Billich sul percorso intrapreso porta sempre ad una maggiore chiarezza, ad una vitale semplicita espressiva. Il processo dell'arte contemporanea, dapprima solenne e allegorica, poi spinta alla mimesi e alla maschera per rendersi irriconoscibile eliminando infine anche la struttura, porta oggi al repechage della struttura stessa rivalutandone l'importanza secondo i canoni di un nuovo positivismo. Per questo motivo, la "citta" di Billich, segreta ed enigmatica, interrompe il dramma di una solitudine senza scappatoie inserendo nuovamente la possibilita di un ricostituito rapporto sociale all'interno della vita, mentre i lacci si sciolgono ed i robots fondono al sole di un riscattato umanesimo. E una serie di echi lontani, di segnali luminosi che s'intersecano nei volumi architettonici, di messaggi ancora da decifrare ma certamente in possesso di una loro chiave d'interpretazione.
Una scenografia essenziale ma composita, in cui le opere dell'artista australiano si ordinano come le quinte di una mise-en-scene, apre alla comprensione, e una finestra aperta sul futuro che colma i vuoti della fantasia. Le memorie della nostra civilita delle immagini cercano di aprirsi un varco nello spazio e di collaborare all'impegno dell'artista nella elaborazione di uno straniante e magico ambiente urbano. Permane un sottile disagio che niente riesce a dissipare, come se le preospettive suggerite da Charles Billich per dare corpo alla sua fede in un domani libero ed energetico non possano trovare conferma nella storia vissuta giorno per giorno.

Art Critic, Franca Calzavacca

A kinetic painter... (by Franca Calzavacca)

In all his work, the artist Charles Billich continues his rigorous search for the inner meaning of the composition, in all forms to which he moulds it according to his own needs and the external influences of the moment. A dynamic personality and an indefatigable worker, Billich paints in location that lend themselves to introspection and reflection. He leads a busy and stimulating life, surrounded by friends who share his interests on different levels. Conscious of possessing technical skills that are far from common, he uses them to achieve results of a very high quality in terms of style, putting together on paper or convas harmonious aesthetic messages, using surreal trompe-l'oeil effects which he complements with the skills of a master colourist. Our attempt to put the work of this artist into chronological perspective quicly shows him to be a creator of original forms and new languages of art, and these are fundamental to a serious study of his work as a whole. His total output, from the beginnings to the present, shows a clearly defined line of expressive development with no gaps or omissions which might prevent us from establishing the fabric which forms the basis of his artistic invention. His subjects have changed over time, but always consisitently with the complex and meticulous personality of the artist. The same subjects repeated in sketches, drawings, book illustrations and paintings form a homogeneus synthesis of the variety of themes deriving from aesthetic attitudes moulded by time.
Only when Billich's predetermined standard of formal, technical and conceptual perfection has been reached does he move on to the next phase, which is always demonstrably linked to those preceding it. A plasticity of movement, images simultaneously imposed on the planes of the painting, a perception of space and the cosmos, conceptual design complemented by scenographics, neofuturist "machinism " - all these components have appeared in his work over time, for he sees a work of art in terms of forms and subjects to be arranged skilfully within the pictorial space. In order to organise the different situations which come together to produce this unique creative result into a single aesthetic entity, the artist goes into contemplative isolation for the definitive stages of the work. While Billich's spatial themes are constantly being updated, they are also an unfailing consideration in his artistic planning, because he has always been fascinated by the transfer of geometric forms to other dimensions, in as much as they assume new transcedental, subliminal meanings. Several series of paintings are based on the quality of colour, and on chromatic combinations or clashes which have an autonomous value, independent of the traditional iconic relationship of the work. The effect of these simplified forms is then to concentrate our attention on the totality of the composition.
Among the precise elements of which Billich's formal language and tonal implications are made up there is a dominant urban theme of the utopia, the imaginary city. The symbols of our daily existance, viewed as trough a magnifying glass or a kaleidoscope, are documented on paper, convas or a wall, and due to their concise chromatic forms or the combination of colours in defined and cleary marked areas they take on an extraordinary evocative quality. They become essential elements, endowed with such conceptual importance that they could go on being reproducted for infinity in an interconnected series of variations. Painting kinetic futuristic landscapes excites Charles Billich because of the possibilities they offer for opening up new atmospheres, entering new spaces and environments.Certainly we should not underestimate the recreational value of many of this artist's works: he follows the principle that art must satisfy very precise requirements, not least that of offering strenght in the face of life's tensions and support against the harshness of alienation.
The logical devalopment of Billich's painting along his chosen path leads to an ever-increasing clarity and an essential simplicity of expression. The course of contemporary art, at first solemn and allegorical, then pushed into imitation and disguise so as to become unrecognizable, and finally eliminating even basic structures, is today leading to the resurrection of those structures and re-evaluation of their importance according to the canons of a new positivism. For this reason Billich's mysterious and enigmatic "city " suspends the drama of a soltude from which there is no escape, and offers in its place a return to the possibility of reconstructed social relationship in our daily lives, while the bonds are loosened and the robots melt in the sun of humanism redeemed. What we have is a series of distant echoes, luminous signs intersecting within architectural spaces, messages to be deciphered and holding within themselves the key to their interpretation.
In a continual movement of stimuli, the emotional tension of Billich's canvases plunges into compassion, while the heavens shatter into a myriad of tonal harmonies and space becomes fixed in a metaphysical state. A composite but fundamental conceptual design in which the works of this Australian artist are arranged like the wings on either side of a stage, opens a new world of understanding; it is a window opening into the future, filling the empty spaces of the imagination.
The memories of our culture of images strive to make their way through space and collaborate with the artist in his task of devising an alienating yet magic urban environment. A vague uneasiness persists, and nothing will dispel it, as though the perspectives Charles Billich sets before us to give concrete expression to his faith in a tomorrow that is free and full of vitality cannot find confirmation in the story of our daily lives.

Art Critic, Franca Calzavacca

Contemporary history confuses a writer not merely because he knows too much, but also because what he knows is too unreal, too unconnected, too broken up. Only after exhaustive and lengthly consideration can we begin to comprehend what was essential and important, to underestand why some things happened in a certian way, and thus to write history instead of a newspaper.
R.G.Collinwood

We can say that contemporary art starts from a father who gave up his children and deprived them of their legacy, it then continues by chance and through misunderestanding, while logical connections can only be derived from a philosophy of art that defines art in a very positive and decisive way.
Herbert Read

Each approach to a new work and author bears in itself a latent danger of an incorrect appraisal (whether positive or negative), a disorientation in the present and in areas where various historical and environmental assumptions are active, so that incorrect and unclear interpretations are possible, because of what Collingwood terms "unreal, inconnected, broken" elements. We know well how many things in our age are disconnected and shattered.

A period as shattered as the 20th century is almost impossible to find in art history. This can lead to misunderstandings, especially if a work by a new author is not linked with models, if it eludes references to what has been occuring immediately prior in art, if it is opposed to its time, the fashion, and the accepted rules of behavior, as well as established values. This is exactly the case with Charles Billich and his art, wich is in collusion neither with tradition, as seen from the European point of view, not the international avant-garde.
Billich's painting can only be accepted on the level of the present, or its should be rejected as a historical misunderstanding. No middle way exists in this dilemma, as this painting does not have one foot grounded in tradition and other in the avant-garde. It does not rely capriciously according to circumstances on various values in the broad range from tradition to avant-garde. The search for the real values ig Billich's painting should start from this observation. His art is obviously not an episode in modern art nor is it a page torn from some vade-mecum of modernism.
The fact that this painting does not give mirror reflections of avant-garde trends gives it the legitimacy in a certian way to represent a time that will take over the heritage of our neuralgic age, with all the luster of its glittering rises and deep declines.

Perhaps it should be said in this analytic moment that Billich's painting is not free of "original sin", wich is inherited by every civilizaton created by the exiles from the Biblical paradise, those who can build and demolish inly on the assimptions of their imperfect human nature, in a continuous exchange of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Billich's art also does not lack the so-called "negative" signs of our civilization, otherwise it would not be able to represent and encompass our time as an indivisible whole. The important fact that Billich is "out of synch" with his contemporaries confirms the hypothesis of his belonging to a trendy circle. He is consequently beyond the coordinates of the old and new avant-garde, and in the same way, he is beyond the tradition of those European epicures who have developed a perfect hedonism of color: wouldn't these refined gourmands of Bonnardesque color consider Billich's painting as lacking "spice"?
Perhaps we are not far from a conclusion that painting wich is rejected by the two extremes i in fact a possible solution pro futuro . To whom, then, can Charles Billich's painting belong, apparently beyond time and beyond ambiance? To whom else than to Billich, the painter who on a new continent has accepted the world with all its assumptions of civilization, found in it a cradle of civilization at a moment when it had not yet been attacked by the virus of sophistication and intellectual speculation, when it did yet ferment with Alexandrism. Billich in his work has not overlooked, omitted, suppressed, or underestimated any dimension of civilation, on a major scale so-called daily information to a synthetic to express the weaknesses of our world, all the passions that tear it to pieces, its whims, superficialities, exesses, discontinuities, dangerous exclusivities, hermetisms, and inclinations towards distorted and simplified beauty, as well as its new values in the light of new aesthetics. Billich's art is not exclusive, it is not painted only for aristocratic souls, and is not adjusted to the seductive and (not rarely) demagogic formula of populism. His painting is understandable and accessible to what is mockingly called "a cook's taste", as well as to the sharpened senses of refined connoisseurs. It would be dangerous to mix these two completely opposite categories of taste when discussing comrehesion, because intelligibility and the ability of interpreting motifs do not also mean understanding and interpreting the essence of the fine arts. If all the works of the great Renaissance masters are taken as an example, we can see that a congregation was able to interpret, decode, and grasp the basic of every story, but the cirlceof refined connoiseurs who could find a true sensation in the artistic message was reduced. I would say, of course metaphorically, that all Billich's paintings are in a certian way altarpieces in the temple of our civilization, their story understandable to every eye, and their fresh artistic expression accessible, at least at first, to the taste of those who approach them without prejudices or burdened by tradition or avant-garde aesthetics. The umbrella unfurled by the bourgeois in Manet's "Breakfast on the Grass" remains an unsurpassed and always topical symbol.
If Mario de Michelli's thesis is correct, that modern art did not arise by evolution from the art of the 19th century, but rather from a break with its values, then Billich's break with traditionalism and the avant-garde is truly significant for our age, as well, of course, as for the paintings of this artist. Both traditionalism and the avant-garde, which the so-called new art decisively disputed and rejected, are located in Billich's work with the same tendency towards a rupture. What did this painter nonetheless accept from these, and on what basis did he proceed? What is visible at first sight is a scheme of hyper-realism; I repeat, a scheme, because this is not accepted as an "imitation of nature", even though the artist tried to approach this as much as possible, but as negation of outward appearances in an aperceptive manner. If it is possible to "copy" the world even better than with photography, then the very reality of such a world comes into question. This is a conscious conception, an understanding of the world by means of observation, meaning self-perception.

If Billich, breaking with traditionalism and the avant-garde, accepted a process which also defined our modernity, then lack of comprehension of this fact by no means changes the inseparable membership of this painter in our age. If one part of theory and criticism (Quite specific!), dependently bound to the so-called avant-garde, does not recognise the signs of the times in Billich's painting, this is an advantage at the moment to this painter, who has obviously broken off ties with "historical losers". So far, in the avant-garde practice of "demolishing the classical ideal of beauty" there have already been "short circuits". This happened in the sixties with figuralism of objects (pop art), in the seventies with photographic realism (hyper-realism), and in the eighties with anachronism. Although realism had been confined more than a quarter of a century ago, it has nevertheless "remained before the doors of history", which had to open sooner or later. In the three mentioned variants of "returning to realism" were not exceptions, neither were they the rule inside (still!) avant-garde research practice. The reasons for this flight from the avant-garde laboratory still have not been sufficiently examined, and for the time being they can merely be conjectured: was it "material fatigue" (abstraction), did the generations following the "great predecessors" understand that the avant-garde (revolution) cannot be institutionalized and bridged over with academics, did the public and the purchasers show signs of a surfeit with non-figural art, or was it, in the end, the realization that after a war, the battle flags are deposited and kept in - museums? These are all questions still awaiting answers, which are not at all simple, just as the questions are not simple. Among them, certainly "historical tolerance" will not be a marginal question: the furthermost borders of any concept that before them marches history. With the appearance of conceptualism, it was already clear at the beginning of the eighties that the historical battle of the avant-garde had been lost, that it had arrived at the stage of trendy disintegration, and that the very last line of a historical chapter was being written. Plainly, this was difficult to understand for those who has found a profitable and promising "firm" in the avant-garde.
It was equally difficult to understand "upon the return" that figural art could not take up at the point of its interruption when avant-garde art appeared. Even though avant-garde (abstraction) decisively and without reservation rejected all postulates of figural art, considering itself as the opposite, it was no longer possible to wipe abstractions from the "historical blackboard", because this would mean, if we omit imitators, epigones, and copyist, erasing an entire historical period in whose development some of the most brilliant minds of our time took part. It would be difficult, and humiliating, to accept the thesis that the great figures of the avant-garde were mystifies and cheats, and it would be especially difficult to accept a "vacuum" in art history, although major periods always alternate in history with less important ones.

Did Charles Billich understand this historical lesson or did he instinctively follow "the call of History", as dictated by his talent and nature? One thing is certain: on no account was Billich prepared, regardless of historical "demand", fashion, or favorable or unfavorable historical moments to sacrifice his above average talent, as defined by impeccable craft perfection, exceptional drawing virtuosity, and definitely not a negligible factor, the capability to perceive and "remake" what we will summarize with the term realia. This includes the exterior phenomenal world with the reality that surrounds us, directly and visible, and yet, as Kanovitz formulated for hyper-realism, "...everything is like it is, but it is still different from the way it looks..." What a formula for Billich's art! And yet this is not a scholastic formula with dogmatic interpretation and compulsions. Obviously, Billich did not insist on "critical realism", dry photographic information or documentation, the social realism of the Zemlja (Earth) movement or the German movement known as Neue Sachlichkeit, or poetic realism, or indeed any realism with historical references. The actual type of realism present in the work of Charles Billich will be examined in the following chapters. While in this introductory chapter, I have tried to define the position of this painter in contemporary painting and the world of our days, to see whether and to what degree he belongs to it, in the following chapters I will try to make you, the reader, answer the question of Billich's position (beyond Australian and Croatian painting) in contemporary international art.

The "Beautiful Illusion"
In The Battle For Post - Modernism
Then I wanted to return to painting
Everything that had been driven from it....
I wanted again to try to do everything
That had been strictly forbidden,
What apparently was considered intolerable.

V. Tannert, 1982

Here is a formula all returns from exile and removals of all prohibitions. Only boldness is necessary in this battle against formalism of any kind. Yesterday against the formalism of traditional art, and today against that of avant-garde art. Is this not exactly the case with Charles Billich, who returned to painting what had been banished throughout the avant-garde decades, and removed all the strict prohibitions that the dogmatism had imposed? Certainly, he opposed the "premises of modernism", exactly in terms of these prohibitions, with what was dismissed and prohibited and, accordingly, "intolerable". "Associations can begin again, it is rumored!", exclaimed S. Schmidt Wulffen at the appearance of post-modernism, for which he also said that "...the surface is the place where everything happens...". For Billich, I would add that on this surface everything happens in a way that is not connected to our habits, in fact it opposed them. Insisting on "ornamental decoration and the beautiful illusion", Billich does not continue in a fatal discontinuity of tradition, but with all the experiences of our modernity, without choosing either a specific period or source.
I would begin with the partition of this monograph into cyclical units, through which we will discover the real intentions and scope of Billich's painting. A theme reveals a painter, his interests and point of view, his professional possibilities and the limits of his imaginations, and determines his position in society and a historical period. The theme is a kind of percussion resounding and examining the "inside" of art. Billich is confirmed as a witness and a poet of our civilization exactly through his themes and subjects.
I should, in fact, be more precise in linking Billich's painting with the term "our civilization", and clearly note that this is a civilization with a strictly defined way of life and manner of behavior in the industrial era of our age, with inhabitants of large urban agglomerations, with artists who are creatively capable with "civilizational memory" of "remodeling" even the highest standards of civilization, even recycling.
This conditional factor of urban places and specific lifestyles should, of course, be accepted with certain qualifications which leave no room for obsolete systems: the progress of civilization is unstoppable, it is the river of Heraclitus which flows continuously and into which everything flows. This dynamic constant is precisely the most obvious driving force in Bilich's painting, his way of thinking about the world and the span of civilizations. This painter knows very well the relentless rule according to which any halt, any static position, any scholastic, any ideological imprimatur, is perilous and fatal. Our "civilization in a hury", and Billich knows this very well, never travels down a one-way street, and this is exactly the cause of all the crashes and conflicts in our dramatic century at its close. Does his manner of painting represent a "cautions" return or a rupture with the "carelessness" of the avant-garde?

Belonging unquestioningly to the new continent, into whose painting he has conveyed various experiences, Bilich really cannot belong (without reservations) either to tradition or to the avant-garde. In that I see his specific pioneering position in the milieu with which he has completely fused, and which has necessarily resulted in his special contribution to the art of our age. It has been confirmed that this painter, who had continuously flown over the continents, who had become familiar with the mega cities of today's world, had an excellent chance to surmount the lessons of pluralism, to liberate himself from prejudices and local deceptions. When the anxieties and convulsions of an "aggressive civilization" move into a painter's blood stream, obviously, he cannot paint any longer according to the regulations of Impressionism on some quay the Seine, in the museum-like environs of what we will call the Parisian colorist sensibility and cultivation of the painting subject matter. Was this hypothesis not confirmed, even before Billich, by the American painter Edward Hooper at the beginning of this century?

I believe, when it is a question of a painter of Billich's provenience and associations, that two completely separate concepts should never be mixed, identifying a painter who works according to the dictates of a historical conscience. Paintings by romanticists and visionaries should be clearly demarcated, which nonetheless does not mean that either of these viewpoints should be defined as "more inferior" or as enjoying any primacy. The romanticist or the visionary? Is this not the obverse and reverse of the same civilization? If we free ourselves, really free ourselves from certain prejudices in terminology, is not, for example, Mondrian (no matter absurd it seems) in fact a "romantic" in his unfinished New York work Victory Boogie-Woogie? If we really want to penetrate into the essence of some phenomena, we should, first of all, read the labels on them, change some of our habits, and renounce rigidity and dogmatic intolerance towards some theses and definitions, allegedly "irrefutable" and "established for all time"?

In judging Billich's painting it is necessary, above all, to start from the basic premises, from the very simple and practical fact that this painter spends his life in the bellies of steel birdcages, in concrete greenhouses, that his life in taste and need for the "beautiful illusions" is formed in the boulevards of the major cities with luxurious shop windows, that the painter's erotic sensibility and his experience of women is conditioned by erotic magazines and commercials, that his palette is a mirror reflection of the city lights, the aggressive neon, and theatrical lamps: Billich's painting is, in short, constructed entirely from our civilization. I would say that within it there are almost invisible "remains of childhood", and erased memory of the Garden of Eden. Billich starts from facts which can appear devoid, of poetry, unfiltered and rough in the prosaic nature of their "urban machinery", but Billich's special sensibility knows how to bridge over them creatively. If we do not comprehend that Billich belongs completely to the "new world" (and the new continent), that he shares his human and artistic fate with it completely, that his break with the European painting tradition is neither accidental nor simulated, that his decorative style did not result from a lack of sensitivity, or more precisely, from an entirely specific kind of sensitivity, but rather from acclimatization to a new reality, then we really have not understood anything in Billich's painting, and there is no way for us to reach agreement in this confusion surrounding the construction of an artistic Tower of Babel in our time. If we, with our habits and judgments, remain rigid and inflexible towards all the open possibilities of post-modernism, we will stand impotent before the insurmountable wall of conformism.

The matter will be clear and acceptable only if we come to terms with a common and comprehensible language. It is precisely known with how many unknowns one can operate in mathematics so that certain axioms do not come into question. It is now known with considerable certainty that uniform and unvaried criteria for art no longer exist, that the so-called classical aesthetics have broken into tiny and numerous bits of anti-aesthetics. Attempts to find and establish a common and uniform denominator for the anti-aesthetics of our days, so as to define the values of 20th century art by means of uniform criteria, are not isolated. All is in vain, in the already broken mirror of contemporary art, we can no longer see a clear and complete picture. If we understand that possibilities no longer exist of operating with the same criteria among individual concepts and the various definitions of art, then we will understand the definite separation with what we call the European painting tradition at the turning point of Billich's painting career.

A Pas De Deux Of Civilization

Dancing scenes have an isolated and prominent position in Billich's paintings, not merely because of the painter's past in the ballet of the Rijeka Theater, but also because of the symbolic meaning the painter gives to the past de deux of our civilization. The first painting in this monograph ( The Magi, 1993.) is already very symbolic: a magician hold the strings of dancing puppets in his hand. The implications of this dynamic composition are not difficult to decode: our dancing steps are the equivalent of the unforeseen fate leading us to the moment when all the bright lights will be turned off. How much melancholy there is in the picturesque finale of the dynamic dancing step with which we make our way through life on the glittering stage of our civilization!

This cycle has deep roots, as was said, in the painter's past, in the moments of the painter's first encounter with art: the painter is obviously, still passionately devoted to the dance, hearing music inaudible to us that moves the dancer's body and releases in him the "enchanting rhythms". We are faced with a great ballet expert and skillful choreographer, an imaginative scenographer worthy of the most magnificent Hollywood ballet spectacles. Billich's ballets are shown in classicist, gilt rooms with marble Doric columns, on wide stone staircases, in the glittering of frosted glass chandeliers from the fin the siecle ( Dance of the Faceless Men, 1990.; Victoria on the Move, 1993.; etc.). These ballet scenes are the most fantastic theatrical illusions in the style of the world stages. Billich presents himself through them not only as a painter of superior virtuosity, but also as a ballet master of the most bizarre possibilities and enviable creative power. "The Rebuilding of Rome (1990.)", is in fact a complete ballet project with twenty-five dancers on a "cinerama" wide stage, and is not only the work of an impeccable perfectionist, a draftsman of incalculable potentiality, but also the imaginative vision with a human message and deep symbolism.

The history of dancing movements in Billich's painting dates from the painter's very beginnings (Extinction, 1974.), and during the following years it was continuously renewed in ever more profuse and imaginative form (Call from the Interior, 1976.; Cabaret, 1984.; Hedonistic Carnival, 1989.; Slight of Hand, 1991.; etc.). The painter does not retreat in these ballet scenes before accusations of "attractiveness", "decorativeness", "fabricated illusions of human reality", "kitschy Americanized spectacles", "The lack of taste of the commercialized entertainment industry", but on the contrary, he forces his ballet scenes to Hollywood paroxysms (Cabaret, 1993.), and without complexes or fear of being judged of "dubious taste", he enters museums and paints petrified dancing movements as sculptures (The Sculpture Museum, 1993.). This dancing step frozen in marble is the obvious finale of a glittering illusion, and an illusion can only be glittering and luxurious.

The provenience of these scenes is thus known and based in experience, in knowledge of the material - these scenes are all still active memories, indelible images of a well-lived past. There is no simulation, nor any false art for art's sake in them. These scenes cannot be different, poorer, glitter less, as they would then not be what they are, they are necessarily "raised an entire octave" in the painter's fantasy, and they are irremovable part of the painter's world view, and at the same time they belong to the painter's poetic being and his dramatic vision of Balsac's human comedy, with which Billich's painting is also interwoven.

Art Crtic & Art Historian, Josip Depolo