The Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik
Curator: Jelena Tamindžija Donnart
The works of Igor Eškinja take as their subject the production of the image in contemporary society, in the current age,suffocating in the media transmission of images in all formats. They play with the perception of the picture in this day and age as well as with the concept of the image in the dictionary of visual culture and of art history. In the context of contemporary society, which is characterised by extreme visual saturation with images, accompanied by their rapid alternation, people, which is to say the users of the media space, gradually empty these images of meaning. This is a process of dense cacophony that is marked by the methods of overlapping, multiplication and stripping away of meaning. The definition of the image in the artistic vocabulary of Eškinja is not uniform and fully formed; in his works he subjects it to incessant reinterpretation and the re-reading of its layering. A kind of deconstruction of the image is going on, the artist entering the sphere of the apparentlyBaudrillardian simulacrum in which the concept replaces reality. But the artist here is not feigning the creation of other worlds, working, rather, on the deconstruction of the perception of the world we see and giving us a different view of ordinary objects.
For the selection of the materials to use in his works, Eškinjaresorts to the inventory of the everyday, choosing materials that occasionally we don’t notice in our lives up until the moment when we really need them. Whether it’s a piece of A4 paper, sand, self-adhesive tape, the artist restores to these apparently banal items a modicum of dignity, placing them in the centre of the story, making them the protagonists. It’s important to point out that all these materials have a certain function, a given place in time and space that appoints them their role in everyday life.
