ARCO Madrid 2024
Mane Šakić
6-10. March
Mane Šakić is a painter of confident strokes and great expressive power – his works are rich in intense color and texture. In the dynamics of yellow, blue, and ochre layers, clean surfaces are retained that resonate with a particular motif that artist can create: its inner lightening. In his canvases, everything is in harmony and tension, just like in nature, that the artist relies on. His spatially defined abstractions become the site of internal struggles, conditioned and determined by a higher force and fate beyond our understanding. The paintings Blue blood shark, Life on a high mountain, and Scarecrow made of stardust and love, carry epic proportions of existential struggle, but not without the beauty of vitality and mythological emotional connection.
According to the Šakić: “All social patterns and currents of the modern age carry the consequences of technological explosive changes and reduction of human perception for observing the world.” Many inexplicable sensations and phenomena have long surpassed questioning about consumer society or technological revolution. The endangerment of human existence itself has prompted the modern artist to a new, almost ultimate awakening of primal consciousness and forgotten archetypal principles that have been either dormant in the artist’s being or destroyed in the state of HYPER IMPREGNATION, which inevitably necessitates a call for awakening of forgotten archetypal, almost mythical qualities of the thinking and awake man – artist.
The understanding of confronted worlds and the loss of universal human values, the absence of empathy, cruel wars, corruption, and fake news have led to a huge relativization of all elemental human values. The modern world has renounced or forgotten the secret codes of its existence. Under the powerful anesthesia caused by sensations and fears, almost paralyzed, the artist should present the paradox of the modern world. Conflict and equalization of VICTIM and PERPETRATOR lead us to a bizarre fusion of extreme opposites and form the image of a new modern body, a being woven and built from monumental opposites. The victim is also the perpetrator. Horror is salvation. Water is stone. The artist is an artist.
– Ksenija Samardžija