I find your themes interesting, the simplified figures, and the textual content that accompanies the works. On the edge of humor, reality is simplified, and in doing so, it highlights… What is happening on the canvases?
What happens and develops within me in relation to external circumstances is always my personal response to understanding life itself. Through the visual language, I try to portray psychological and social themes that interest me. I aim to use symbols in my paintings to simply show the condition of modern humans, how their psychological state affects themselves and the environment. I’m interested in using symbols to depict relationships, phenomena, and characteristics of certain things. For example, I have a series of works with a lollipop, which actually represents a boss/authority figure or someone who feels that way. This series of works shows how the lollipop (boss) uses its position, its relationship to the power it holds over others, and how that position of someone more powerful, someone who feels like they’ve achieved something, is actually a limiting position where we are constantly unfree.
Then, there are works where I explore the state humans find themselves in daily: pressure, the struggle for existence, lack of empathy, fear… Some of these works depict just a human head, and with that symbol, I suggest that it represents a person. Some of those works are: The Difficulty of Being, Gloom is Around the Corner, The Clinic for Removing Other People’s Frustrations, Rehab…
Sometimes, I use a word as a symbol; in that case, the word itself takes on the role of what I want to highlight in the work. The word dangubalija, which I created from the word dangubljenje (wasting time), served as the concept for a series of works that followed. In those paintings, there are some landscapes, or seemingly ordinary events that, together with the inserted word, take on a different meaning.
What techniques do you use, where do you work, and explain to us the process of creating the image?
I like to work freely. They are mostly oils on canvas, drawings on paper/cardboard created using a combined technique. It all depends on what I have available for work at that moment. I have some concepts for installations that are, for now, only on paper. Sometimes I just want to let my hand draw freely, without the burden of what it will mean, and these are mostly notebooks full of such idle things. I enjoy it just as much, because the lack of inspiration can actually be liberating. I draw something every day, it’s my ritual. I turned the apartment into a studio; it’s not big, but that’s where I painted my biggest canvases, so you could say I live in a studio. The picture is mostly created as a result of a sketch, and later I arrange it coloristically, mostly intuitively. I use six or seven colors and make different shades from them.
As an artist of the younger generation, how do you perceive the position of artists in society, what do you notice?
Society needs an artist, a philosopher, an observer — in today’s time more than ever. People are suffocated by lack of time, existential questions, all kinds of personal problems, and the existence of art and artists allows reality to be recorded, not ignored. I don’t think enough is allocated to culture. It is a shame that the Association of Fine Artists has two galleries that have not been taken care of since who knows when. Being an independent artist in Serbia is a completely crazy thing. I mean that “vocation”. The artist here is settled by paying the minimum from the state for our health and social insurance, which is more than shameful. And that’s where the story ends. I no longer have that title. Again, on the other hand, various speculations and schemes are made with private or alternative galleries. There again you have to beg someone for something, or to be part of the team, to be a little entertainer. “You just be beautiful” hahahaa…
Ksenia Samardzija