Works

In Josip Zanki's drawings, nature is not a scene observed from the outside, but a space one enters — slowly, carefully, almost ritually. With ink and pen, the artist builds the landscape stroke by stroke: every stone in a dry wall, every branch of a tree, every leaf receives its own line, its own weight, its own duration. What at first glance appears as a landscape soon reveals itself as a meditative act — the image is created with the same patience with which nature shapes what it depicts. The works gathered in this exhibition move between two poles of Zanki's oeuvre. On one side stand dense forest scenes — pines and beeches with intertwined canopies, rocky terrain overgrown with moss, paths that disappear into the depths of the image. These are landscapes of the Velebit and Dalmatian hinterland, stripped of all touristic idyll: serious, quiet, almost archaic. The technique makes them even denser — the networks of lines are so compressed that the image begins to vibrate, branches transform into nervous systems, and stones into the bones of the earth. On the other side, in certain works, elements that do not belong intrude into the landscape — a Gothic portal in the middle of a forest, a Buddha in meditation surrounded by rocky slopes. These motifs are not intruders but keys: they open the question of what a landscape becomes when it ceases to be merely geography and becomes a spiritual space. This is where Zanki's long-standing exploration of the Tibetan thangka tradition and its relationship to the image as a place of presence, rather than mere depiction, is most clearly manifested. Between two poles — the corporeal (tree, stone, soil) and the spiritual (portal, sage, emptiness) — the drawings find their own rhythm. They do not seek explanation, they do not illustrate a thesis. They ask for the viewer's time: to pause, to enter the thicket of lines and perhaps recognise within it something they cannot name — but feel has always been there.