1. Geometric composition No 1, 2018 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

2. Geometric composition No 2, 2018 oil on canvas 100x120 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

3. Geometric composition No 3, 2019 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

4. Geometric composition No 4, 2019 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

5. Geometric composition, No 5, 2019 oil on canvas, 100x120 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

6. Geometric composition No 6, 2020 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

7. Geometric composition No 7, 2020 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00
 

8. Geometric composition No 8, 2020 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

9. Geometric composition No 9, 2020 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

10. Geometric composition, No 10, 2020 oil on canvas 100x80 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

11. Geometric composition No 11, 2020 oil on canvas 80x100 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

12. Geometric composition No 12, 2019 oil on canvas 100x120 cm. Price $ 1,800.00

The field of geometric and coloristic abstraction is an inexhaustible source of possibilities for artists who are familiar with mental combinatorics, and not just having an innate and later perfected sensibility for color. Today, when we talk about the tradition of abstract art and various abstract morphologies, the abstract matrices look like infinite possibilities of musical combinatorics and variations of intervals and consonances, which again reminds us of mathematical proportions and combinatorics that can be found in their genesis.

The painter Josip Rubes is permanently committed to an idea of perfecting his abstract artistic expression, but what gives his paintings seriousness and persuasiveness is the fact that he came to the abstract morphology by gradually reducing a template of real, realistic landscape, more precisely, of the tame landscape of Hrvatsko Zagorje which is characteristic by its color transitions of vegetation and earth. From muted tonalities of pastels in which he made landscape motives, Josip Rubes moves more freely towards a version of action painting in the manner of Jackson Pollock, a phase that many artists have gone through in a process of liberation towards dynamic painting expression that separates them from realism.

This process of extremely gesturally dynamic action painting with spray paint used by Josip Rubes from 2008 to 2011, will, however, be increasingly separated from the Pollock's version, striving to create complex abstract grids and layers in the painting, which will be very deep and spatially dynamized. Yet with Rubes, we cannot feel chaos, restlessness, and irritation in any of the paintings; even when it creates an extremely dense abstract fabric of the image, there is no clutter in the lines, coatings, and dots of colors. This way of painting is not a therapy, nor does it indicate how the painter "heals" himself with it, but he is interested in the complex mastery of painting profession and abstract nets and combinatorics. Horror vacui or so-called the fear of the empty surface in this phase of the opus isn't unbearable to the observer, it emanates a pleasant and positive vibration of color and mood, whether it is canvases painted in the warm or cold spectrum of the tonal palette.
By creating the "action" compositions over several years in continuity, in the paintings of Josip Rubes from 2014 and 2015 appear smaller, fractally geometrically arranged parts, which get fully their autonomy in the painting without dripping and lines. We come at once to the space of rational abstract combining, where the image is created by a carefully arranged raster of shapes with fine tonal transitions in warm or cold tonality. Something that was started at the Bauhaus by the painter Josef Albers, is today, after almost a century of abstraction, defined as a so-called polychromatic painting within the corpus of abstract geometry, to which a certain meditative-contemplative component cannot be denied. Many painters struggle within themselves throughout their lives with an emotional and / or rational pole of abstraction, and even the most radical proponents of geometric abstraction will say that their painting is a sublimation of spirituality or a certain spiritual dimension.
 
Combinatorics and variations that characterize the works of Josip Rubes are not just a well-played game, and we should not run away from possible associations on the abstracted landscape of small imperfect fields, soils, and roofs of houses observed from a bird's eye view. This will not diminish the seriousness of the painting, although many abstract painters insist on the absence of personal associations and attribution of any external connections from the real world. However, I would not say that Josip Rubes wants to deny himself as the author of the paintings and eliminate any authorial manuscript as all the other supporters of minimalism want. His well-balanced and arranged painting matrices have something from the concept of healing by color: their crystalline formations and combinations bring joy to the viewer, as well as chromotherapeutic calmness. In the new cycle, the dynamic principle of building an image field occurs again, but no longer in a way of the action painting, but by connecting larger and smaller triangular and square shapes, which with color activation give an impression of pulsation of a whole image. None of Rubes' paintings is "dead", inactive, on the other hand, they are color-saturated.

Approaching completely to the concept of so-called systematic painting, where regular patterns of geometric structures and fragments with gradual tonal color transitions are repeated in a cluster-like image, Josip Rubes creates an extremely visually attractive and striking painting that justifiably contributes to the demanding tradition of European geometric abstraction.

Iva Körbler