The impact of Pop-Icons in recent works

Pop-icons are the subject of dreams, a strong expression for the need for affiliation in a world existing exclusively in our minds, in our most absurd fantasies - they are the screen for the projection of desires, of sexual or even religious vacuums dominating the unconciousness in ones life.

The media presence creates to a certain extent a diffused picture to make them appear as if from "outer space". Despite or even mainly because of their unattainability, we are longing for identification. Real persons who became pop-icons by public absorption as well as iconic comic book characters populate the confusing and sometimes disturbing world of Damir Radovic's artificial universe.

In fact it's a parallel universe founded on confusion - a tremendous implosion of pictures, emotions, artistic expressions captured inside our deepest aims and wishes. The perspective is set completely off its hinges - this doesn't just apply to the composition of his watercolors and paintings but more precisely also to the world displayed and developing in front of our eyes by walking deeper and deeper into the mysterious trails of a yet undiscovered no-where land.

Radovic's stories are composed from the ambiguous and apparently schizophrenic images collected during the nineties in former Yougoslavia and postwar Bosnia. Combined with translucent and at the same time obscure and surreal - and therefore even realer - images of the promising american "canon" culture.

His work reflects the look in the review-mirror for what we can('t) leave behind; the "un"-nessecity of material and emotional possession, seems to be contradicted by Radovics work. By using those promising pop-icons such as initially, the all american, and finally, the global Laurel & Hardy, the Statue of Liberty, Mickey Mouse but also Vucko (the mascot of the 84 olympic winter-games at Sarajevo, Bosnia) and Buddha, he is putting the observer into a maelstrom of irritations and allusions.

Critical political statements put in an all-embracing language such as the mentioned comic book characters became not only part of a truly global childhood memory but are going far beyond that. Mixing up positive reflexes and negative charged impressions out of a global and local cosmos, or better speaking atrocious, barbarous reflexes from a dumbfounded, doomed world marks Radovics way towards a complex understanding of the incomprehensible - a world consisting of hate and disillusion where one might only find relief in even more chaos and confusion.

As the world is such an irritating place to live in, Radovic is one of the apologists of its conception of chaos and relief. His abbreviated pictorial language of suggestion, achieved by the evoking of common dreams, leaves us astonished and speechless.

But don't you feel frightened by the weight of images - by using the full range of chromatics he is also able to draw the attention on the lyrical side of the world.