Matija HajdarhodžIć

I was born in 1984 in Zagreb.

And drew like all the other kids, maybe a bit better than the rest of them.

I was especially turned on by complicated textures and repeating patterns, like roof tiles on houses, branches on trees that branch further on and on, as long as my pen can take it.

Fascinated by perspective, I considered it too difficult for me, I drew everything flat.

At ten or eleven I got obsessively interested in cartography, on every mudge I knew where to put a port town protected from sea currents and waves, and spots on stains would clearly be lakes or massifs, I admired the accidental design of the coastline.

Particularly thrilling are city maps, logic of forming streets and squares, laying the habitant space over the nature given configuration.

I drew only maps, hundreds and hundreds of them, experimenting with different approaches and studied professional topography.

At the age of thirteen I'm frustrated about knowing some guys that are way better in copying reality than I am, their bears and birds actually look like bears and birds, while mine look like mere symbols for bears or birds, graphically reliable, but it's obvious I haven't got a clue about ratios.

So I coped with ratios, drawing birds nails, cats snout, but I'm screwed when the cat turns her head, what happens with the snout then, again it became too much, and I felt I'm doing something wrong, I'm having a great time combining various parts of different animals, but my drawings seem sloppy to me, I don't like them, for at least four years I don't draw a dash.

But then, thanks to consuming art more and more, I discover I was doing wrong by forcing myself to refine my line instead of fixing it in place, like Hundertwasser, Picasso or Van Gogh did, I take a fresh start, and I very much like the result: in a smooth and confident line I detect a superiority of the composition and microcomposition over the form.

I create like mad, drawing people and animals, every shape is good as long as it's solid and...

I also work on a clay house village and it grows into a local attraction (building fronts are present through almost all of my phases), people start helping me by making tiny fences and gardens, we redirect a creeklet so it flows through the village, we form two little lakes, comes the thought of photomapping the scene and storing it as a virtual platform for interaction and moving through it with the help of photo slides, but the project fails in negotiations with the Czech company Amanita Design who usually that way brilliantly animates computer games, and the ceramics were crushed by the cruelty of Norwegian winter.

But now I like big paintings, big canvases, huge brushes, buttery smears and their squishing, I paint fat naked women in actual sizes, fighting and stabbing each other with various objects.

I get a bit lost, I like what I did in my twenties better than what I do now, I decide to get back to stylized people, who become white for some reason, I try to truly draw, to transmit what's really happening around me, I want to cubisticly archive, to tell, in my given taste, from my flesh, through my eyes, and that's the origin of my latest art show which I set in Zagreb last spring.

After that I made only a countrysid...