The figures on canvas were produced mainly in the 1990s, after Pristavec’s intensive engagement with crumpled paper and almost autonomous colour surfaces. The body returns, but it is no longer built as a unified volume. It is composed of colour blocks, interrupted contours, diamonds, diagonals and rhythmic fractures. The physical fold of paper becomes a painted crack on canvas.

The harlequin is the ideal figure of this transition. The costume naturally combines person, mask, pattern and role. Coloured diamonds do not merely cover the body; they construct it. Likewise, musical instruments are more than attributes: flute, trumpet, violin or double bass extend the gesture and determine compositional direction. The musical scene becomes a model of visual rhythm.

Faces are often simplified, almost empty or mask-like, so psychology is carried primarily by posture. A solitary figure may appear melancholic, a couple tense or intimate, and an ensemble like a choreography of coloured bodies. The space is shallow, theatrical and deliberately artificial. Curtains, platforms, vases, moons and indeterminate sets emphasise that the figure performs. The cycle joins abstract thought to human presence and prepares the ground for late Mythology, where mask, animal, costume and bodily transformation merge into a personal pictorial world.

In the figures on canvas, Pristavec tests whether the body can return to painting without cancelling the experience of abstract surface. The result is not a restoration of the academic figure but a body that is simultaneously human presence, colour construction, costume and sign.

The corpus of figures on canvas might at first be understood as a renewed turn towards a recognisable motif after the more abstract crumpled-paper works. Such a chronological scheme, however, would overlook the essential point: Pristavec does not return to the body as it existed before his material and chromatic investigations. He reconstructs it through the very means acquired during his movement away from figuration. The human being, pose, costume and scene reappear on canvas, but their internal logic has changed. The figure is no longer a model surrounded by space; it is the field in which space, colour and rhythm become concentrated.

The term return is therefore useful only in a dialectical sense. The motif returns, but its status is transformed. In earlier figuration the body can still be read as a coherent whole whose anatomy is supported or modified by colour. In this cycle it breaks apart into chromatic planes, diagonal connections and ornamental accents. Arm, knee, torso and face are no longer components of a unified volumetric organism, but nodal points within a composition. Pristavec thus preserves the recognisability of the human form while treating it almost as he had treated the colour field in his abstract works.

In the crumpled-paper works, folds, depressions and fractures are physically present in the support. Canvas offers no comparable pre-existing topography. Pristavec must produce material tension through painting itself. He does so by means of dark outlines, interrupted contours, sharply abutting colour planes and patchwork-like subdivisions. In the harlequin costumes in particular, the body is divided into diamonds, triangles and irregular segments, as though the artist were translating the relief experience of paper into an optical construction.

This translation is not mechanical. Painted fragmentation does not imitate folds; it recreates their effect: the whole is simultaneously connected and broken. Dark lines perform a double function. On the one hand they define the body and preserve its legibility; on the other they cut it, open it and turn it into a mosaic. In certain works the outline recedes and colour patches join more softly; elsewhere the separation is almost graphic. These varying degrees of closure show that the artist was not seeking a single formula, but testing several ways of depriving the body of natural homogeneity.

The harlequin is the most articulate vehicle for this procedure. By tradition, the costume is already based on division, repetition and contrast. It therefore enables Pristavec to inscribe chromatic-geometric thinking directly into the body without dissolving the figure beyond recognition. The harlequin is at once person, costume, mask and pattern. Within this figure, the figurative, decorative and symbolic meet naturally.

In European modern art the harlequin frequently served as the artist’s alter ego, as a figure of unstable identity and as an inhabitant of the interval between everyday life and the stage. Pristavec does not quote this tradition literally, yet its fundamental potential is evident. His harlequins are neither portraits of performers nor illustrations of commedia dell’arte. They are transitional beings: between masculine and feminine, person and mask, repose and performance, actual body and chromatic construction.

Faces are highly simplified in most of the works. They are often oval and almost empty, with only a few dark signs for eyes, nose and mouth; at times they approach a child’s schema, at others a mask. This does not indicate an absence of psychological interest, but a change in its vehicle. Individual physiognomy recedes, while psychological tension is transferred to the tilt of the head, the position of the body, the relationship between figures and the chromatic temperature of the composition.

In comparison with the crumpled-paper faces, where the gaze often directly intercepts the viewer, these figures are more enclosed within their theatrical world. Their eyes are small or nearly absent; the head tilts backwards, sideways or towards an instrument. Identity is thus formed not through portrait resemblance but through role. Musician, harlequin, seated woman or rider are not concrete individuals, but types defined by action and costume.

The strongest works maintain tension between recognisable figure and pictorial autonomy. The body remains human while carrying the memory of fold, crack and colour field. In this sense, the figures on canvas form a central link in Pristavec’s development.