The Spectacle (sketch) Painting

This is a sketch for a large scaled painting I did back in 2015, although it is as detailed and precise as the one did for the 3rd Biennale of Painting in Zagreb exhibition. Although it is painted in a way that resebles photography, this is not a painted documentary scene any more, but rather a complex representation constructed by digital manipulation in the first place, and then translated into the medium of painting. It is a way of forgering reality, and a product of the same reality in the same time. I've used "The cursed crew”, a painting by fellow artist Zlatan Vehabović as a background, because it functions as a common place in our local culture. By doing that I wasn't focused on the very painting nor it's author, but to highlight paintings role as a product of marketing, a spectacle which uses different ways of intermediation to show us the world we cannot experience directly any more. The group of Canadian tourists taking a group selfie was partly constructed, and partly borrowed from the Internet. They resemble the famous Plato’s allegory of cave, experiencing reality only over intermediation of digital picture on their phone’s screen. The art has been taken over by life itself, in the very moment when life became artificial, reproductive, replacable.