YEAR: 2005.
TECHNIUQUE: ACRYLIC ON PLASTERBOARDS
SIZE: 60X60 CM
This series of paintings on plasterboard called “PORTRAIT” consists of pictures that were painted with white paint on a white background, and only visible in these images are reliefs that are incurred when applying the paint. Reliefs that can be seen are embossed numbers – codes, which represent the personal identification numbers of a person and make the person bureaucratically recognizable.
Codes were drawn from Croatia’s bureaucratic system and it is important that those are the codes that all Croatian citizens have from their birth until death. Some of the codes are: national identification number, the number of health insurance, passport number, national identification number of academic citizen, etc. Paintings also consist of changing codes, but codes that can be tracked in a bureaucratic system: numbers of bank accounts, student identification number, credit card number, membership card numbers, etc.
As the main difference from classical portrait painting in which the physical appearance of a person, which remains identical through the year, regardless of changes in life of portrayed person, these portraits change with changes in life portraits of people. Of course those changes are not the physical changes on the picture,
but the codes that are contained in the portrait give us the possibility of checking the current portrait/physical appearance of that person.