Dejan Grba, Thermica, photograph, 1996.
The dematerialization of the art object is accompanied with the radical change of the very concept of art that becomes transparent, vague and elusive.
Dejan Grba is an artist who works with various themes, from body and identity to violence, using technology as a medium to transform his reflections, emotions, wishes and intentions into spectacles. Materialized into photographs or digital images, these vistas of superficial reality often induce a sense of desolation or cold astonishment because the artist offers the results or expressions of his personal choices, but refuses to take any responsibility for it. Dejan Grba aims to create an artistic situation (or process) rather than an artwork. The artist’s presence remains hidden within a substrate of pure emotions or thoughts, just like the data in the fluid world of information in which the real objects are absent.
This cybernetic approach brings us into a post-human epoch, into the realm of relativity where everything can be something to something else, where anything could be art but art is no more, where the reality is ultimately æstheticized and the vision is rendered before it is experienced.
Čedomir Vasić, Dejan Grba's Thermica, Thermica exhibition brochure, Murat Associazione Culturale, Naples, 1996.