“In life, as in art, it is difficult to say something which is as efficacious as silence”. It is sufficient to read this sentence by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential of the philosophers of the twentieth century and a leading figure among the fathers of linguistics, to understand how this concept, both abstract yet alive and concrete, contains a fundamental importance for all time.

In the painting of Robert Hromec, silence is a protagonist and a detector, a tangible reality or only a partial revealer of bodies which merge and intersect, creating complex chains that lead us back to the primordial pleasure in being a human generated from an embrace, a sort of sensual metaphysics of classical origin which reaches its culmination in the transcendence of profane love.

Robert Hromec confronts an introspective search, an intricate route where the human figure is at the base of a Pirandellian thought, namely the reality is life: a perpetual movement, a real and incessant transformation from one emotional state to the other. We are in front of a mental method which goes beyond the objectivity of the real until it arrives at the Suprematism with which the art of Hromec predominates over the objectivity of real appearances. The artist works with a total simplification, reducing the volumes and the structure and wisely representing reality in a totality of SILENCE which reflects its interior dimension.

His style is primitive, pure, innocent, and brings to life a conjoining of lines and form, with inspiration from Matisse and his more direct acolytes, where the artist invites us to “listen to” a silence which, as Wittgenstein teaches, is better than so many words without a precise conformity, and is at the same time a force that springs from that vital energy that accompanies us on the infinite journey that is life.

Arianna Grava
Milano, 2016