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"Foetuses and autopsies ... "
- Hans Arp, referring to the masks of Hugo Ball, 1916.
"Psyche x Flesh I Dream .. .Physiofacial disturbances .. . fluctuating skins ... heads doing (aura) frustrations .. . flesh formations ... distortions ... Heads - classical portraiture + stretch dynamics I futurist cubism + organic abstraction (within daily news) = (?) This could be what my work is about ..."
The urban landscape is described by perfectly defined and ordered Euclidian geometry. No room for escape; we live our whole lives contained by straight lines, perfect circles, right angles. Until the relationships that describe our environment begin to describe us too.
Zeliko Maric's work operates within this context of rationality, order and aesthetic harmony. Works painted on pages of newspaper, then hung in the sanitary white cube of the gallery. But the work ruptures these lines of containment, the newsprint which describes random and unusual acts but in so doing seeks to rationalize and recuperate eccentric and "unconventional" activity. Maric's inspiration comes from photographs in the newspaper, and tactile inquisition of his own features. He paints heads of crazed, disordered organicism, of viscera gone mad.
Maric's work can be intensely off-putting and disturbing in its implications, yet it is also inviting and seductive in its renunciation of the classical painterly depictions of the human physiognomy.
In deference to painters who might seem to be seeking some kind of netherwordly status as masters of their art Maric functions very much in unison with his painting. There's something really raw and direct in this work, an intensity which would only be diminished by seeking to construct a recognisable