About Mladen Večenaj
Mladen Večenaj was born in year 1947 in Gola. He started to paint because his father Ivan encouraged him. With him and his younger brother Josip he has performed on exhibitions of this three authors and few group exhibitions. He has exhibited in Hlebine, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Milan, Rome, Bologna, Turin, Novara, Hilden, Düsseldorf, Split and Gola. Mladen Večenaj is one of the distinguished colorists in podravina’s naive art.
By using his fathers legacy of colors, he treats it like a separated element, trough accented contrasts of pure pigments, but also trough soft gradients and light effects. He is also unique for his often stylisations and simplifications of form, decorative games with plants and rhythmic propagation of landscape in depth.
Večenaj’s thematic preoccupation is similar to the one of other painters with exception of landscapes in foreground in which the dominant details such as water surfaces, stylized trees and hills are on the distant horizon. Younger Večenaj reached, therefore, his own artistic formula. Although he paints with oil on glass, he distinguished himself from the other by emphasing all advantages of this technique: shimmer and intensity of colors. On the other hand he respects all the conventional values of this technique and he doesn’t want to be an exception inside of the naive art.
Although his art comes from the ambient of his native village, still he’s not completely tight to it, because his motives, objects and characters are in their own way universal and general. That wideness gives his pictures a dimension which is unusual inside of Hlebine circle, and therefor makes it even more interesting. He lives and works in Gola.