About Brave new old Worlds
My works concerning this state of being are collected images gained from the very recent present—newspapers and magazines of the 21st century. They are highly current and, at the same time, very old. For what concerns their content, they belong with Goya, going back 200 years. A comparison is inescapable, and frightening. What exactly is it that man has learned from the past? How far has his evolution carried him forward? What measures his advancement? Is he turning into a state of “being human” perforce, as Nietzsche calls it? Or does he invariably revert to the animal state when conditions are ripe for it? These images are witnesses to the fact. We may well ask ourselves the question if, maybe, it is only via the scientific-technical route that man can truly achieve the state of being human.
The technique to transport the feeling of cruelty is a free, destructive form I use in an organic way. It explains time as well as man’s disfigurement. The deprivation, horror, and hardship speak to us through the subject matter and the material. It can be felt by the viewer through the painful, rough touches and strips.
Since 1999, below are a few recent works in the last four years…
2026
2025
2024
2023
Artist Statement: The Cruel Absurdity
In 1990, I was brutally confronted with the horror of what humanity is capable of. I was forced to realize that a certain kind of human still exists, those capable of acting with a horrifying, unworthy cruelty that I thought belonged strictly to the darkest chapters of the past, yet now bled into the dawn of the 21st century.
The collapse of Yugoslavia and the war in Chechnya exposed scenes of absolute deprivation: bewildered, inhuman, and beyond words. They revealed the true depths of human evil: murder, terror, and the bestial treatment of others.
Was this humanity? Was this the threshold of the 21st century? Had we learned nothing from the devastating history and wars of the 20th century?
My vision of humanity was totally shattered. It collapsed, irreversibly changed. I found myself asking: Are humans truly incapable of elevating themselves to a state of sustained civilization?
Instead of progress, I witnessed the opposite: slaughter, forced displacement, and the animalistic nature of man turned inside out. This, it seemed, was humanity in its rawest shape when constraints are removed: creeps, brutes, monsters, cruel beasts unable to control the chaos within themselves. They proved entirely incapable of empathy, a quality we so desperately claim as inherently human. And as always, the victims remained the same: defenseless women, children, the starving, and the displaced—kept on the run, beaten to death.
I used to believe this savagery belonged to the past. It does not.
It will always return when we lower our guard. It will always manifest when the right, terrible circumstances align. It is the shadow side within every one of us, ready to rise at any moment, time and time again.
The Witness of the Canvas
This is precisely what my paintings are about: biblical sceneries of grief, pain, distress, and cruelty. They capture the malicious pleasure found in the misfortune of others—the schadenfreude of the wicked. They stand as witnesses to modern destruction, unfolding like a long film strip of maimed, desperate, and excluded souls.
Human existence, it seems, is a cruel absurdity.
The parallels between these works and Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War cannot be denied; they are frighteningly real. What have humans actually learned from history, or do we always reset to the absolute bottom of civilization? What do we actually achieve in our evolution, or do we reach our moral limits almost immediately? Does our animal state permanently prevent us from fulfilling our human potential? Or can progress only ever be realized in a sterile, scientific, and technical way?
How controllable is this systemic flaw? Does it amplify with the growing global population, where so many seem marked by an unyielding, changeless brutality from the very beginning of their existence? Is uselessness our only future? For many, obsolescence is the next emerging phenomenon.
My paintings bear witness to our contemporary world. They are fundamentally based on true images of our global society: photographs from newspapers, magazines, and documentary films. Every single day, new atrocities enlarge this endless lineage of evil. Will the end never be in sight?
These pieces are executed with a destructive technique, yet translated through a lens of profound empathy. That is their core identity. The content is universal, a stark signal of warning for all those who are willing to look, and intelligent enough to understand.
