Oligophrenic Obsession

Vladimir Vinkić, Portrait, photograph, 2005.

Through the analysis of self-portrait in a series titled Portraits, Vladimir Vinkić’s exploitation of wit is retroactively transformed into project. The notion that different viewing angles transform the head’s appearance and identity is a base for the visual research that becomes conceptualized in the process of painterly or photographic variance in composition, shape, colour and lighting.

What is distressful in Vinkić’s use of wit as one of the crucial and prevailing determinants of culturally mediated contemporary art, is his avoidance of clear position or comment. His repetitive rendering brings neither elaboration nor solution of any clearly defined problem but, with small changes, it makes the monotony a bit more endurable.

In this performative simulation of dailiness, the cognitive or ethical issues are excluded while the disharmony between continuous inflation of the series and its incompleteness or formal imperfection of its constituents, can be considered as the worryingly ironic interpretation of social reality as a sort of endemic oligophrenic obsession.