Ivan Suletic, 1982 - 11.05 - 05.06.2018

Ivan Šuletić is a visual artist living and working in Belgrade. In June 2007, he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2009, he completed postgraduate studies at the Painting department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. In 2015, he earned PhD in Fine Arts at the Painting department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade.

 In his work Ivan Šuletić is researching concepts of space, place, identity, as well as local political history. He treats his work through the relation of contemporaneity towards critical points in History of Art or local political history, and through dealing with universal concepts of cities, monuments, architecture, identities. He approaches to paintings and drawings as procedures, whose processes in many define final shape of the works and ways of their presentations.

Šuletić’s paintings and drawings are structures generically organised through repeatedly painted details randomly extracted from the chosen digital photograph of countryside or urban ambience. The magnified detail of the selected sight/scene turns into a motif, a kind of pattern that constructs an infinite painted panoramic configuration. Such a procedure in the construction of landscape has a direct reference to the ontology of landscape as the space within which representational problems have been solved during the long history of painting since landscape was born in the Renaissance by the separation of a single fragment of the countryside panorama and its translation into a painting, or by the framing of a section or a scene from the countryside into the picture of landscape. Šuletić imitates this principle, but the premises of his procedure are significantly different: the section of nature that serves as the point of departure in his work stems from the already reproduced image of the landscape, and destabilises the frame that defines the framework of the landscape by creating the structure of the picture which spreads into infinity by means of repetitive expansion of the initial section / pattern of the landscape – thus turning into the mask of landscape.