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Below the surface
Dušan Puhar
13/06/2025
In an age when painting is easily subject to retouching, filtering, and endless repetition, Dušan Puhar (b. 1983) chooses a technique that tolerates no mistakes – watercolor. He chooses water, paper, and the moment. His art is not born from the need to prove, but from the quiet, dedicated practice of careful observation.
Watercolor is a technique that does not tolerate mistakes. One stroke of the brush, a drop of water too much, or a moment of inattention can change the entire painting. There is no going back, no fixing. The artist must know where to stop, when to be silent, and when to let the water and pigment speak for themselves. This kind of painterly honesty does not allow for illusions – everything that happens on paper remains forever visible.
Experts call this technique “painterly haiku”: a concise but powerful form of expression. The paint is not layered like in oil, but transparent, the light reflecting off the paper itself and penetrating through the layers of pigment – just like thoughts that remain in memory. In Puhar’s works, this light becomes a character, an atmosphere, a whisper.
In an exhibition opening at the atmospherically powerful Alvona Gallery in Labin, Puhar presents a cycle of watercolor portraits that rely on figuration but go beyond mere representation. His models are not posed – they are caught in their own thoughts, in introspective moments that the artist translates onto paper with incredible subtlety.
Puhar’s portraits exude calm. Their eyes rarely seek contact, but they carry the burden of identity – enigmatic, perhaps painful, but always dignified. He does not embellish reality, but approaches it with respect. In the transparency of the layers, one glimpses not only the face, but also the silence of time, the fragility of feelings, the invisible tension between what we show and what we hide. It is a space in which the portrait ceases to be a “picture” and becomes an encounter – silent, but moving.
Dušan Puhar builds his poetics of painting far from noise and spectacle. His watercolors are a departure from a world that does not acknowledge mistakes, but also a gentle reminder that beauty often lives precisely in what is fleeting, fragile and true. In a time that stops less and less often, his painting teaches us to look slower, deeper, more carefully – as if through water.
This exhibition is not just a display of skill – it is a silent meditation on man, on the faces we encounter, and those that emerge from within ourselves. Puhar invites us to immerse ourselves – not in color, but in presence. To pause before a face that seeks not applause, but understanding.
In the space of the Alvona Gallery, whose stone walls have been preserving the spiritual silence of art for decades, Puhar’s works find a perfect context. In this combination of fragile transparency and heavy Istrian stone architecture, the portraits gain a new dimension – one that makes them almost sacred.
This exhibition is not a retrospective, nor a review – it is an insight into the process, into the practice of everyday searching for faces in color, searching for a gaze that does not seek attention, but understanding. Dušan Puhar does not paint to convince, but to listen.
And that’s precisely why each of his portraits acts as a mirror – not only of the faces we observe, but also of our own gaze. The one that lingers, perhaps, for too long. The one that finally sees.
dr.sc. Branko Metzger-Šober, prof.
Dušan Puhar was born on April 24, 1983 in Pula. He has always been involved in painting, and after graduating from the School of Applied Arts and Design in Pula, majoring in painting, he experimented with various techniques – acrylic, oil, stone processing, airbrush – but he was most attracted to watercolor, which is today his main medium of expression. Since 2014, he has been intensively working on portraits in watercolor, and in recent years he has focused on figurative studies and the study of human anatomy as a basis for expression through form, light and movement.
He has been a member of the Croatian Society of Visual Artists of Istria (HDLUI) since 2025. So far, he has participated in numerous group and several solo exhibitions.
He regularly enters international online competitions, and in 2024 he won the award for best nude in watercolor at an exhibition at NOMA Gallery in Florida.