Vikendom rekreativno (Recreationally, on Weekends)
In contemporary everyday life I almost always see the weekend as a kind of rupture in the continuity of life. We give it an almost mythical meaning: we experience it as a temporary autonomous zone, a promise of distance from routine and a chance to catch our breath. In a world where it is hard to imagine a future beyond existing structures, the sense of possibility moves into the short cracks of the everyday – into moments when we sense that we might be able to pause.
During the week the body is defined by its function, embodied in work and in the time we sell for a wage. At the weekend this relationship seems to loosen. The body temporarily slips out of its working role and tries once again to feel its own presence, most often through the melancholy of rest.
Inspired by Hegedušić and Trumbetaš on one side, and by Rivera and Latin American social painting on the other, I place my figures and scenes, through the lens of magical realism combined with a naive idiom, within a weekend everyday that feels at once familiar and slightly displaced.
My protagonists are neither romanticised working-class heroes nor vehicles for lectures about social injustice, but ordinary people caught in the moment of trying to feel themselves again. Stylistically they are not academic ideals; their anatomy is not ugly but honest. These are heavy, clumsily painted bodies that carry the traces of everyday life.
Magical realism here is not merely an aesthetic ornament but a conceptual tool. It lets me show the weekend as a slightly shifted state of reality, a temporal heterotopia in which the everyday remains recognisable while a space of emotional detachment opens up. It is a space where we dream of ten-metre-long cigarettes, where seconds beat like a heart, and where the melancholy of the small hours returns us to a half-world between sleep and habit.
In this shift, banal situations acquire mythical weight. The weekend appears as a time when everyday gestures are filled with the expectation that life, at least for a moment, will become denser and more real.
