Ivo Režek: realizam kao slikarska konstanta

The realist component, which runs through Ivo Režek's painting as a fundamental thread, gave it a special characteristic and a significant feature. This content thread and stylistic constant of "realism", on which the expressiveness of his artistic messages was based, unlike many other painters, had a strong internal logic and meaningful justifications. The protagonist of modern Croatian painting between the two world wars, known in caricature under the pseudonym Ives, a modernist of classical formation, an artist with engaged painterly sensibility, Režek remained unobtrusively present during his life, mostly outside the mainstream, thanks to his realist will. This also applies to his early stage of European outreach, when he had all the predispositions to be among the leading artists of the contemporary art scene. The modernism of Ivo Režek's "neo-realistic" design was not properly recognized in our country at that time. But despite a kind of misunderstanding with time, our historiography, without a doubt, classified him in the anthological series of painters of the era. In this historical positioning, he was given a more prominent place in the period of the early formative moment, especially in the twenties and thirties, when he participated more effectively in the trends of the times.