New World_Reflector Gallery_2022

In New World, presented at Reflector Gallery in Užice in 2022, I embarked on a process of radical reduction, stripping away representational form and allowing color to become the defining structural element of my practice. This shift marked a turning point—an attempt to deconstruct traditional composition and rebuild it through pure chromatic relationships, where form emerges as a function of color itself.

My primary painterly reference for this process was Color Field painting, a movement that explored the immersive potential of vast, unbroken planes of color. However, conceptually, I drew upon the utopian ideals of Russian Constructivism, particularly its vision of restructuring the world through a new visual language. By placing these two historical paradigms into dialogue, I sought to collapse the divide between formal abstraction and ideological function, allowing the works to exist in a space between aesthetic autonomy and an expanded conceptual framework.

At a certain point in the process, the visual results of these experiments began to resemble islands scattered across a map—floating territories of color, distinct yet interconnected. This realization led to the conceptual foundation of the exhibition: the idea of a "New World," both in the sense of a newly developed pictorial model and as a reflection on broader social transformations. Emerging from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this body of work became a proposition—a speculative landscape in which painting, digital media, and conceptual history converge to navigate the shifting contours of contemporary reality.

The final phase of this experiment introduced 3D animation as a counterpoint to the physical presence of the paintings. By extending the logic of these color fields into digital space, I explored the tension between flatness and depth, the static and the dynamic, materiality and virtuality. In this way, the works in New World oscillate between painterly tradition and digital expansion, reflecting a world in flux—one that is constantly redefining its own parameters.

New World was not just about abstraction; it was about construction and transformation, about the possibility of new territories—both within painting and within the world itself.