"COL21" Painting

My practice is rooted in material investigation, where the artwork becomes a site of layered processes unfolding over time.
At the core of my work is industrial cold tar—a primordial substance formed from ancient biomass that carries geological memory. Tar absorbs light, slows movement, and resists clarity, introducing friction into the visual field. When combined with oil, gesso, and pigment, it generates a continuous negotiation between opacity and luminosity, between what is buried and what is revealed.
These dense, absorptive surfaces function as active fields—capable of retaining, resisting, and transforming the materials they come into contact with. Each work evolves through sequences of action and reaction, of revealing and concealing. The surface becomes an archive of gestures, material events, and temporal shifts.
Central to my work is the notion of layering as a structural condition. Each painting develops through successive strata of material interactions: absorption, oxidation, sedimentation, and reactivation. Layers merge, collapse, crack, and reorganize, generating forms that cannot be fully predetermined.
Layering functions both as a material process and as a perceptual model. The strata evoke the body as a layered system, where internal and external states continuously interact. Emotional registers—such as tension, trust, and anxiety—are translated into shifts between density, exposure, and movement across the surface.
This process aligns with FLY—my broader research framework—which examines how complex systems evolve through the interaction of opposing forces. Within this logic, reality itself is stratified: what we perceive as surface is an event horizon—the outermost layer, the visible threshold of deeper, unseen processes. The work unfolds through a sequence of encounters—between matter and void, control and unpredictability, density and dispersion, concealment and revelation, darkness and light.
The concept of Centar operates as a conceptual anchor within this layered field. As a synthesis of “center” and “tar,” it proposes that structure emerges through accumulation and tension around a core. This condition can be observed across scales—from cells and molecules to organs, planets, stars, and galaxies. Each evolving phase forms a new layer, while each stratum retains the trace of those preceding it—an inscription in time. The center, however, remains dynamic, continuously shifting as new material is introduced.