Your works always seem to straddle the line between the real and the otherworldly, between human, animal, truth, and the abstract. Parasites, bacteria, guinea pigs, mutations, infections, the micro and macro world take on visual dominance. What’s really happening on your canvases?
There are nuances that need to be added. When I think about my work, when I identify with it, and even when I don’t think about it, viewed from the outside, it feels like the twilight of previous civilizations, a vision of the world that is almost perfectly acceptable as an exalted chaos. The fatigue of our species is reflected in the daily concerns of each individual, woven into the permanent fear of the final act. That’s precisely why I strive to be a failed skeptic, filling the space with deep absurdity, which I both mock and admire to some extent. These works express what I’m convinced of, which doesn’t belong to me but rather to some infinite lack, a feeling that everything is either collapsing or has already collapsed. Each of the entities mentioned struggles on the canvas; passivity doesn’t suit them—rather, they are consumed by obsession or egoism as a defense against an extremely subjective world to which they themselves belong. The paradox is that I, by nature, am the exact opposite: an invisible type. I don’t mingle with people but simply wait and watch to see if all the superficial celebrations in the people around me will eventually turn into an orgy on their own. At worst, I’m a humble servant of my work, and that’s understood as such. It would be laughable for me to act as an author without accepting a fate that’s more or less my everyday reality. Everything becomes bearable when you have something to fall back on. And that indescribable circus from my works is connected to the life force of death and its metamorphoses. What I’ve experienced over the years and what has intertwined with my work, despite my will, is this obscure world of a certain territory, and it feels like these works have created themselves—from some unclear fabric, perhaps even a bad taste in experience, or a wrong order.
The painting is anchored in visual symbols and codes, like the chronology of a silent underworld—things and wonders that we cannot see but sense, moving silently all around us, crawling…
—Yes, it’s a debate about despair, obscurity, immediate situations, one that plunges the modern illusion of unlimited progress into the mud. It’s something that renders meaningless the mission that each of us is a guardian over one or more destinies, an intense idea that, from birth, we are surplus. There are worse things, for example, the mediocre spirit that has settled into everyone and everything under the daily routines of action. You’re reading these images from a conventional side (one filled with anxiety), and that pleases me because such an approach establishes a focused calm in the observer or reader of the work. But things are far uglier. I could easily be a demon myself, like the protagonists in my works, but not as a human. A certain distance is needed to see things clearly. That’s why painting is bathed in excuses and endless illusions. We, as a foundation, are destroying the world worse than any living creature. Today’s visions of the world are, in a sick way, acceptable in every form, right up to the sinister aspects we’re tasting right now. Undoubtedly, the ones who will survive all this are the rural people, who have inner warmth, who don’t flatter the world. And that’s been the case for a long time. If, for example, some absolutely bizarre pogrom or higher form of catastrophe occurs, I’m convinced that all my paintings will be burned, and I along with them (laughs)! That’s its own kind of adventure and madness.
In your paintings, drawings, collages, the eye is a frequent motif. A hardened, lost eye, alienated from its own being. It’s as if all your creatures are passively watching us in a long, silent gaze?
It had been established as a code for a while. In short, by my culture and understanding, I consider myself a free spirit; when I say that, I mean I view things through my own temperament. More precisely, my imagination, theoretical imagination, is of a subtle and delicate film. It seems that such a self-perception is, in a symbolic sense, a tranquilizer on one hand, but a heavy anesthesia for the artist on the other. Changes are necessary (within the framework of personal interest) because it’s impossible to create a homogeneous image, an ideal image (in itself), without first exhausting certain motifs. When the moment comes when those symbols overpower you or simply become spent, the artist drives them away and changes either the approach or the method, both of which are considered a new starting point. For the entire process to unfold as painlessly as possible, time is necessary. Therefore, the work sooner or later solidifies, and then it sheds its rigid shell of routine as soon as all the dizzying delusions are used up. The whole process ruthlessly remains without conclusion. When I say conclusion, I unequivocally mean the physical death of the painter. Thus, we are all victims and accomplices in the flow of time, which will slap a greasy period over our authorship without mercy. An entire world will disappear and will not be worth a dime. The future, like the ravages of time, is an old whore that perversely tortures her lovers. However, material has always been governed by various types of formalism, prejudices that unfortunately dominate interpersonal relationships, and that is a great catastrophe. In short, an artist is convinced by the invisible threads of fate to look from above; he builds a system, holds privileges, which is a fundamentally great delusion compared to the real relationships, which are actual life processes of action, containing failed actions that are yet to be realized, and paradoxically, they are impossible to even imagine. Unfortunately, we provoke our own panic and misery. All of this devastates, and a person (here and there) becomes a mannequin (model) of that wrong image and opportunity. Painting is a living organism with a burdened autonomy because it possesses a higher logic in how and whom it punishes or rewards; it independently protects the soul and maintains timeless immunity. If poorly nurtured, it escapes from the hand and runs away like a chicken (did you know that giant chickens in Estonia are symbols of resurrected dead during memorial days?), it slips out of your eye (laughs). You have to be careful with these things, as much as possible and as long as reason serves us.
You say eye, and I think that every symbol in an artist is contradictory and ambiguous, generous and caring, selfish and conceited. Such things have a double role; they are used to be prayed to (in recognition) or for killing, because a style emerges that easily feeds self-satisfaction, and quickly the pursuit of something unknown is abandoned. The eye is a disturbing thing, mythologically gloomy at the same time; its constant moisture is simply shocking. It’s a strange place, positioned in the temple, which is the pit of the face. Behind that entire construction, blood flows, capillaries extend. Eyes are salvational. It’s certainly not a human eye, but I refer to it as such all the time because it’s easier for me to jump from my own physicality to something that is, let’s say, otherworldly and unknown. So yes, you’re quite right in a sense—it’s the initiation of the eye, which belongs neither to man nor beast, but to the accidental origin of things.
Ksenija Samardžija