Church of St. George's
When Fabijanić, with his architecture of adapter dilapidated church of St. George's, finally enters the town by play of coincidences consistently on the Cardo north direction, all the reasons for deliberation and all formal procedures are already adopted. But not on the level of recipes but on the level of ingredients. This is the reason why every time again the same thematic range results in an unexpected manifestational richness. So, in St. George's the confirmation of an even earlier author's strive towards gesamtkunstwerk is becoming apparent not only in an architectural-designer sense of the word. The architect's thought is joined with the painter's thought.
The real content of the architectonic stays hidden in the object, as an indirect way of its volume because architectonics is building forms only over planes and edges, over surfaces and lines. Everything else is an illusion of representation outside the scope of authentically architectural values. Real phenomena of an architectural form stay locked in the fullness of the wall. “The wall represents here a metaphor for architecture, for the formal act of space creation, a phragment of a wider and greater composition. The wall is simply a barrier defining what is in front and what is behind...” are the words of Fabijanić in one conversation.
In St. George's church he leaves one non-transparent square wall-opening, a scar from the peeling-off of the material, firstly intended as a place for Šebalj's Jesus on the cross. In this uncomplished barrier-breaking which directs us to unknown thickness, all the tectonic power of the old stone building is springing up. Taking out of the material adds to our image of the object as the author's recognition of his task. Wall as thickness, wall as folding and unfolding in the exhausting search: to discard the outside or to join it to the inside? To thicken or to thin out the barrier, both the one to passing-through as the one to looking-through? This is the way how the ensemble of rotating doors and a glass membrane is being created. Penetration of the new outer wall in its stone roughness and the old inside wall in its plastered fineness are being translated into new materials, wood and glass. A new layer is in its transposed texture speaking of the old layer. Is not Šebalj doing the same thing? On the wooden plate covered with gold foils which barely, but yet, discover the grid of application, he thickens the silhouette on the cross by depositing the paint plastified almost to corporality in order to uncover with his scratching drawing the layers of material, wounding the painting like Jesus had been wounded by thorns.
Planes and lines. Is it not then that the same seeing-through the forms is presenting itself both with the painter and the architect, but in different media?
This tells us that their collaboration is not that of simple addition but the one of the reflection of their metier of same kind-reflection of seeing-through the form. St. George's – a fugue made of glass and wood, of stone and plaster, folding and unfolding like origami in a complex visual door ensemble. Fabijanić is reaching out for plane, edge, texture and grid. The architectural means are a pendant to surface, line, colour and stroke. He is working out the theme of entering-in and exiting-from up to a complete tactile experience of going-through. Really, physically given possibility of a movement has been supplemented with the moved image of transparent appearance of the form. Not only literary but also phenomenologically.
