Dario Srbic
(R)encounter in Digital: Painting and Photography Beyond Representation
Photography’s relationship to painting can be described as a rencounter - a battle, skirmish, or duel. While photography preoccupied itself with representing and “perfecting” depiction of the real, painting had finally gained freedom to ask the question what painting was, and explore possible answers in the last 150 years. Only in the 21st Century with the advancement of digital image manipulation the rencounter slowly turns into an encounter. While at the first sight the convergence of both seems to take place at the virtual canvas the importance of the digital lies elsewhere: the extreme proximity of the process of creation and dissemination. A meme, the digital hybrid of painting, photography and collage, subordinates the importance of the content in order to subvert the correlation of aesthetics and the perceived value of the image, which currency in the virtual space are views, likes and shares. It paradoxically embodies mimicry - a representational tool par excellence - to undermine the importance of the origin, originality and other representational darlings.
Biographical notes
Dario Srbic is an artist and researcher based in London, UK and Berlin, Germany. His practice is concerned with what a photographer can do today, while everybody else is busy taking pictures. His work reveals photography as the medium of the copy, with uncountable recurrences of the same, all its subject and the objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. It does not necessarily involve the camera and a framed print, but understanding the enframing, which photography is normally placed into, and looking for possibilities of letting multiplicity permeate identity, dissolving dominant/subordinate model which identity brings along. The thread connecting all the works is less obvious on the visual level, but rather comes through in the question of where photography can be found. “Where” here is opposed to “what”, preferring the location or territory of photography to the search for its essence. Dario holds an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins and is also a recipient of the Photographic Angle Award Bursary in 2014. From September 2017 he is commencing a practice-led research as MPhil/PhD candidate at Royal College of Art.