I’m interested in my time. Because it’s all I have.
Wolfgang Tillmans 

I hate parties, they bring out the worst in me.
Dorothy Parker

The canvas represents an inseparable part of Marija Šević’s field of perception and is the measure of her world. Interested in how we engage with our surrounding; how we, as individuals, relate to others and indirectly to society as a whole, she chooses the microcosm of nightlife as a framework for her inner examinations in her most recent body of work. Here her surrounding is represented through portraits of people from her inner circle of friends, lovers, young people immersed in feelings of ennui, excitement and the never ending nightlife whose “glue” is made up of intimacy, ecstasy and youth(ful) fantasies. This parallel world, the continuation of our everyday life, is governed by different rules from those of the day – here a specific language is adopted, constituted in a different way than that by which we live at work, at home or in the street.

Concerning the artistic method, these large format paintings are based on photographs, with an intention to open a two-way relationship with the visitors – they speak as much about the author, as do they have the “expectation” to function through the visitor’s own investment and experience. Every painting introduces an intimate moment, a fragment taken out of a particular event. Fragmented scenes and traces of varied atmospheres are united in an intimate inventory of the author’s inner experience of the sensuality of surfaces. Here it is interesting that what our eye actually sees, optically, is to a certain extent much more blurred that it is how photographs usually looks like, because our brain translates such raw “images” into a much more intelligible information. For the artist, painting is a way to understand the world by the means of interaction with these surfaces. They are entry points in which a two-dimensional image gains significance outside of and through the flatness of the canvas – activating memories, evoking colour, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and taste of life. Along these lines, the author generates various psychological situations which each and every one of us can intimately experience.

By dealing with continually moving, repositioning and selectively amplifying and accentuating, the artist avoids attributing any conclusions to her work and as a consequence subordinates her artistic ideas to perpetual re-contextualisation. The paintings then appear to be both random compositions and carefully composed and constructed structures. The insistence on the intimacy between the artist and the subject is the author’s attempt to break away from the codex and convention of documentary photography, and thus its potentially problematic association with the history of surveillance and coercion in public spaces.

Text: Miloš Zec
Photo: Boris Burić