The Heat Painting

Olia Ristic paints nature and its healing power, like Matisse who wrote once that he sought to create an art that would be a "soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue". Her paintings are dynamic compositions and powerful expression of vibrant colours and brightnes which reflects her internal joy and happiness of life. Her compositions oscillate between abstraction and figuration, sometimes within a single work in which colour is an entity that create a meaning. In early 2004, she discovered that she was suffering from leukemia and her life has changed. She spent that summer in Italy. This is where her attitude towards herself and painting has changed. There, in Italy, Rome, Neples, and Capri, her searching for healing has begun, a searching for a new light in herself, for the strength to start all over again. And that is where the cycle "Searching for the Light" has begun. _______________________________________________ The Mediterranean spirit is rather rare in contemporary Serbian art. Yet it has a loyal advocate in the painter Olia Ristic. Picasso, Matisse, Capri, indigo, blue, richly saturated colours and light, all come through in abundance in the painter’s Searching for Light cycle. Olia Ristic’s epiphany – the discovery of colour and light as the basis of her painting – resonates with Picasso’s Mediterranean motifs: his Mediterranean landscapes, interiors, open windows, fragrant gardens and agave flowers. Her own paintings from the sunny and hot Italian south are sheer poetry. Moved by the rich emotion sparked by the landscape, her paintings are a reflection of a deep artistic sensitivity that can effortlessly uncover the beauty of the location; Olja Ristic recognised the visual and colouristic splendour that only an artist’s eye can identify. A painter from a landlocked region, she has in one moment on Capri captured the essence of the Mediterranean and transferred it onto the canvas. And oh, the paintings! The "indigo paintings" by Olia Ristic: cactuses bathed in light, Mediterranean flowers, Iris germanica, Lilium bulbiferum, their colours so saturated and vibrant, jostle for space in the dazzling Mediterranean light, on the background of the dominant indigo and blue. Many arsts have experienced their creative epiphany after visiting Paris. To Olia Ristic, this happened on Capri and Santorini.