The Incomparable Differences

Dejan Grba, Kraftwerk P-b-M, digital video, 1998.

From his Stealth project (Dom omladine Gallery, Belgrade, 1996) and his painting series [The Blue Lotus (1998-2001)] to video works [Kraftwerk P-b-M (1998)], Dejan Grba has established a radical critique of expressionism by the non-expressionist and conceptual problematizing of the appearance and the sense of mass- and techno-image in relation to the differences between public and private gaze. In painting and, somewhat later, in his digital works, Grba has elaborated the various approaches to the ‘screen phenomenon’: from the painted screen to the electronic screen in which the image is generated.

The role of figure in his works is a kind of the ‘symptom’ of the gaze that becomes recognized and distinguished from the object of gaze: between its ‘self-ness’ and the notion of the ‘alien’. At the Stealth exhibition he presented the works of secret (unattainable) authors and the representation of the trivial (visible), and vice-versa: the representation of secret (visible) and the representation of the trivial (unattainable). This turn is characteristic in popular culture and, most notably, in the American fiction film which Grba references.