Aleksandar Todorovic
Aleksandar Todorovic: Born in 1982. Finished the College of Fine Art in Belgrade, Serbia in 2007 as Painter, MFA. Had works featured in Muluple art books (fe. 100 painters of tomorrow, 2013) and magazines as well as art websites (Juxtapoz, Hifructose, Artforum), had group shows in Serbia and abroad (US, UK, France, Germany, Greece etc.) and in art fairs (Untitled Miami 2019, Future Fair 2020, Expo Chicago Online 2021). Represented by Dio Horia gallery, GR. Live and work in Belgrade, Serbia.
Aleksandar Todorovic
1. Hi Aleksander, can you tell us about your background? How and when did you first start to Paint?
Hi, fellow editors of the Artsin Square magazine. My name is Aleksandar Todorovic. I am from Serbia, where I finished the College of Fine Arts in Belgrade as a painter. I have worked as a freelance artist and art teacher since 2008, but started doing primarily my personal art- and also exhibiting it- from 2011 onwards. After a while, invitations for exhibiting abroad followed, with features in art books, magazines, etc. I first started painting when I started preparing for admission to the College of Fine Art while attending high school, but I have been drawing (pencils, sharpies, colored crayons, etc.) from the earliest age. I had a lot of inspiration from comics, cartoons, and movies, and drawing was my favorite activity which I did almost every day.
2. What is your main source of inspiration?
My main source of inspiration is the world around me, social, economic and political issues to be specific, and history to some point as well. It requires a lot of reading and researching, from reading a lot of articles, essays, book chapters, listening to various podcasts, which consume a lot of my time every day. Due to my personal history, because of the place where I grew up and lived most of my time, I became interested in the phenomenon of evil- what is it, can it be identified. In a way, my works are didactic, and they are explorations of morality in particular settings presented in my works.
3. What is your process like? How do you begin to work?
I do not have a coherent way of starting work. It depends on many factors outside of myself. Sometimes I see, hear or read something which inspires me, sometimes my lived experience gives me a certain idea. My ideas may come suddenly, as visual representations in my mind's eye, and sometimes I have a very abstract text-like idea which I ruminate on for a while. Often I just struggle with no idea whatsoever in front of a blank piece of paper. In certain periods when nothing happens- which are becoming increasingly rare- I take some time (days, weeks, maybe even month/s) and sketch ideas, with a pencil or sometimes on iPad, of paintings, sculptures, even installations. If I am called upon to exhibit somewhere, often there is a theme that gives me a starting point. When I am doing a solo show the theme is primarily mine so inspiration has to come from within. In each of these cases, the sketch and the sketching process is the first step. When it comes to my Icon pieces, I then transfer a precise drawing on the board, engrave it, then comes the gold plating, and finally I can start painting, which is a very rigorously defined step-by-step process.
4. Your work has so many details, characters, symbols, typography and logos. Can you explain more how these elements are interconnected both in subject matter and form?
I guess that all of the elements I use in a painting have a sort of function, primarily a narrative one. It is literally never just a purely decorative function behind those details, texts, and logos. Sometimes they are completely fabricated, many times they are reimagined versions of existing symbols, and sometimes I use the logos and signs as they exist, depending on the context. Even though my works have a surreal-like setup, elements of it- details, characters, backgrounds, compositional relations- do have a very distinct function that should inform the viewer of the sort of a message I am trying to convey. I am not handing it down on a plate though, a lot of nuanced messaging often requires some intellectual “heavy lifting” (like the use of binary codes which are not random at all fe.) in order for the work to be fully “grokked”. Then again, people have seen my works in different lights than intended and found meanings which I didn’t put in consciously, which is completely ok.
5. How has the city you are living and working in influenced you and the art you make?
It has definitely made me receptive and observant of the things which are hiding below the surface, of a certain subtext, informing me that the reality we are living and the reality we are told we are living are two very different, if not completely opposing things. Not living in a typical Western part of the developed world, but in a way on the edges of it, and growing up while there was a civil war, sanctions, bombings, dictatorship, the fall of one system, and transition from socialism to some robber-baron form of capitalism (neoliberal one to be exact), did give me a certain perspective and lived experience which many people do not have. 30+ years of intensive and multiple social and economic collapses create a type of collective and shared trauma, a non-ending cycle of misfortune. A certain atmosphere of gloom and despair, or at best-disinterested disassociation, does exist here in Belgrade, which is mixed with a lively, albeit unhappy, erratic urban buzz. Therefore my creative antennas became attuned to those disharmonious frequencies, becoming sensitive to injustice. Living here permanently “magnetized” both my creative and moral compass to the exploration of those pressing issues and themes.
