In painting the imagined interiors of a collector’s living
environment, for many collectors keep secret which artworks they have acquired,
forcing the intrigued like journalists, art dealers, fellow collectors and
other interested parties to speculate, Rade Petrasevic too becomes some kind of
stalker.
Who is the rightful owner of a coveted artwork? There is a
twofold belonging and the simultaneous pull of these two currents - one determined
by economic power, the other one by its ideological value to an entire
generation and shared interest - is played out in the collector’s habitat. The
commodity, devoted and relevant to everyone, though inaccessible to most,
becomes fetish.
Rade Petrasevic ushers us into a very peculiar realm here: the
serious collector does not simply express his taste in choosing his interior
and artworks. As his haven is partially private, partially public, the collection
is providing personal pleasure as well as intended to be shown to a selected
audience. We might call it a Salon.
Rade Petrasevic’s prying is the exact opposite of what Édouard Vuillard’s paintings
were about: the domestic, very personal space of the back then newly
established dominant middle class, portraying one of its most important
innovations – privacy. Vuillard’s sceneries are populated, overflowing with a
familiarity between the depicted and shown in the typically bourgeois arrangement
that repulsed Walter Benjamin so much.
Rade Petrasevic did not include the owner of the fictitious home, and
how fitting, as the collector’s dwelling is distinct from its possessor: it is
bigger than him, so to speak.
Casting thinly spread oil on canvas, he appears to have made
the paintings with marker pen instead. Striking, clashing colours applied with
frantic brush strokes reinforce the feeling that one is standing before a vast
drawing, engulfing the beholder immediately. The magnetic allure might have to
do something with making us feel much smaller than we are, as drawings usually
come in a different size. Compelling the eye to move incessantly between the
deftly placed botches of colour appearing seemingly random all over the
painting and covering disruptively the already furious background, these still
lifes are anything but still.
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