A sense of faded opulence. Let's say people are plates, regular plates. We're born flat, empty, and plain. We then go on to learn how to balance various things on ourselves. We constantly carry things, solid, wet, and sometimes bland things. We run out of space relatively quickly and have to change and adapt to our next ambition, a quality that causes us great confusion in our pursuit of happiness.

Some more dogmatic plates have it all figured out. They insist on only being used in very particular ways, and their belief system says there is only one thing they could and should carry. Some plates go even further and claim that they could only be in use on certain days, causing other plates to say they are lazy and that their idea of being a plate infringes on their existence, causing even more confusion, and in some regions even some plate-on-plate violence.

Some plates reject the idea of being a plate and do not adhere to neither ideologies. You see, they are the enlightened minority, they have abandoned the idea that they should carry anything, all these things plates are expected to participate in are a distraction from the greatness of simply being a plate, a vessel, one which is capable of all but has no desire for it.

While living a somewhat quotidian lifestyle, we tend to take life for granted. Things are where we last placed them, people's responses are unsurprising, and the mundaneness becomes comforting. We begrudgingly cruise through our social media feeds looking at all the extraordinary moments in the lives of our friends and celebrity “friends”, living vicariously, and bookmarking objects we will one day afford.

It may just be that we stopped searching for our ultimate truths or, that our search is too wide. Like the tabs on our internet explorers opened up for later observation (we never do), the information keeps piling up. Eventually, we circle back to what seems to be another person's thoughts, trying to make sense of it all until it all crashes or more likely we just lose interest.

Ivan Mitrović lives and works in Basel, his practice reveals the intensity of modernity and its strong connection to consumerism. Through painting, sculpture, and installation mitrović attempts to portray the subtleties and aggressive nature of our times. Selected group shows; Contrology, Kunstraum Riehen (2021). Amore Emergency, Amore Basel (2021). Soft Shell, Kunstmuseum Langenthal (2020). Hunted House, Swiss Institute New York (2020). Selected Solo Shows; Reich, Stadtgalerie Bern (2019). Passiv-aggressive, Milieu (2017).
Text - Mark Siumin