Sometimes, when you go through Mario Grubisic’s works, you
come across a landscape. You are looking at the epitome of rural bliss. Well,
except, that’s not what you are looking at. You see the amputated version of
it, you are looking at what he has left of it. Eliminating elements of a
picture or video is akin to creating a new one, he states. Removing,
manipulating, re-filming up to the point of unrecognisability, distorting
colors, sounds, forms reminds of painting over a painting. All for the sake of projecting
his very own unreal, often surreal world. He compares this to an escape from
reality, getting there with an occasional side helping of chance. Nonetheless,
his images either remain appearing real or decompose beyond recognition.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
As a child of the 90s, witnessing the acceleration of media,
when television programs started to look like zapping, he would, as most early
teenagers in the 1990s, start to record his own compilations on cassettes, and
they required covers, which led to drawing.
Drawing also came up for him when he as an 18 year old started
working with Super 8, making storyboards. Drawing then, led to painting.
His practice spreads across all mediums for 20 years now and
he is eagerly including new devices, never abandoning the old ones, but going
back and forth between them. This also resonates in the process of creating
works, some of his paintings he started in 2008 and finished only now, in 2015,
while in the meantime swiftly making a myriad of works. Also, his practice
never stopped borrowing from popular media and subculture. It still preserves
in his body of work, popping up in the midst of newer anchors within his quite
broad repertoire, which includes apart from rural and urban landscapes also
floral motifs and components of subculture.
Media are constantly speeding up and so is Mario Grubisic,
stating that his fields of interest basically stayed the same over time, “just
media are ten times faster now.”
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