28/07/2009

How Not To Paint - Introducing Rade Petrasevic


Rade Petrasevic paints, and he doesn't try to avoid the clichés, he starts with it as "you will anyway automatically fall right back in there". Vienna based artist Petrasevic's work catches different energies, mixing them up, overlapping layers of media, cuting out raw slices of visual informations, building an art based on piling up clashing ideas, parasite-like behaviour and "hope for a new shit coming out of all that..."

Petrasevic enjoys Google and other search engine as it's primary inspiration source trying to break out the pictorialist contemporary painting's fences all around, aiming to be true to the medium he's using. Following some kind of neo-greenbergian quest he is making a special point that " the painting needs to be still recognizable as a painting". The unfinshed and the unclean, the layers and strates participating to that purity of the medium even if the "message" is coming out of an internet and tv information mash up topped with banality, a recurrent term in Petrasevic's references, as the only way to "be true to our time".
Of course referencing the mass media seems like old news but Petrasevic renders it in such an awkward way, inducing reminiscence of televisual and hypertextual content, creating with his paintings the experience of a feeling that one has witnessed them previously although the exact circumances of the previous encounter are uncertain, leaving you with the uncomfort of being confronted to something we don't know we already knew.

But above all, there's so much going into Petrasevic's painting that only more can come out, opening new possibilities, alternative truth in constant movement, like a flux of blury images in a silver-screened souvenir.













All paintings are courtesy of Rade Petrasevic
more on http://radepetrasevic.blogspot.com/

No comments:

Post a Comment