Nikola Marković

Born lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. A few terms and phenomena are of key importance for explanation of my artistic work: fragment, overlapping, remix and absurdity. These phenomena are translated from their multiple referential fields into a purely visual space where they bring along the layers of their embedded memory into a new environment, painting. To split up the space, pictorial, musical, sculptural or architectural means to create a conflict in a system that was previously linear and continuous. To provoke a rhythmic interruption. This rhythmic interruption has, against all odds, an aim to establish the narrative, the speech.

The speech of the image establishes itself from all the possible combinations created by accident, forming a new identity derived through absurdity. My individual works are preceded with a wish to continue and elaborate what has already been commenced. I look at paintings and visual information that, in my view, have potential to generate new pictorial ideas. Therefore a remix - a mix of old works, motives and fragments appears as the result of my investigation. This way of working has an inconsistent model of research. I choose elements and fragments from other systems and incorporate them into a new complex. The new complex shifts the point of view, shifts the point of the work, shifts the attitude and plays with various subjects from the history of art, culture and science. Technique of collage, as I use it, presents a simulacrum of collage, because I make a painting mimicking the techniques of collage, quoting and fragmentarily transposing forms of expression and presentation. I paint these quotations manually, by doing this I deconstruct one of the dominant techniques of modernism, bringing it back to the threshold of pictorial language and the sole act of painting. Intentional acceptance of diversity within one environment opens the question on the very ability to communicate. In the core of my practice are the issues of pictorial communication in the age of total connectivity. I plead for another chance to conceive an efficient model of artistic and social liberty (alluding to "˜60s and "˜70s psychedelia through paintings of LSD molecules) and I believe that the act of painting itself still stands for expression of freedom and freedom of expression.