Just as there are no places without
the bodies that sustain and vivify them, so there are no lived bodies without
the places they inhabit and traverse (Casey, E. 2009: 25).
Construct of Reality:
In my research, I explored the work of Photorealist painter Richard Estes as a lens through which I examine my own artistic practice. Estes captures fragmented urban scenes, often using photographs as reflections of the visual and perceptual reality around him. This process resonated deeply with my own practice, where I translate the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional painting. I use photographs to freeze moments in time, reflecting my personal reality, experiences, and thoughts.
This study didn't aim to make new claims about Realism or Photorealism but rather synthesizes key ideas to better understand my own approach. Central to this exploration is the concept of “the construction of reality” — the interplay between what is “real” and what is perceived, especially in the way reflections and distortions shape our understanding. For both Estes and myself, painting becomes a way to transform fleeting moments into something lasting.
By analyzing a selection of Estes’ urban scenes, I contextualized my own painterly process. I then broadened the discussion to include various art historical and theoretical perspectives on Realism and Photorealism, culminating in a dialogue with my own work, which represented a personal construct of three-dimensional reality in two dimensions.
As
an artist, I move through the world in quiet dialogue, observing, absorbing,
and translating it into image. Photography and painting become twin mirrors,
each reflecting a slightly different truth. Through the lens, I am able to
still time, to catch the glint of a moment the eye alone might miss, its
fragments, textures, and quiet distortions.
I
turn to my own surroundings: the familiar streets, rooms, shadows that echo
something unspoken. Capturing them with photography is not enough. I return to
them through paint, reconstructing each scene with intent, not to replicate,
but to make sense of them, to recognize them anew.
In
halting time, the photograph offers a strange kind of reflection, one that
reveals both presence and absence. What we see becomes what we remember; what
we remember becomes what we create. This
collection is rooted in the construction of reality, not as something fixed,
but as something endlessly shaped by perception. A tension between what is seen
and what is sensed. Between the world as it is, and the world as it becomes
through the act of seeing.
I
have been wandering through the idea of a journey, a search for utopian spaces,
imagined or remembered, tracing the contours of heterotopic, liminal realms:
thresholds suspended between presence and absence, here and there.
Hetherington
(1997: 49) reminds us that the weight of heterotopia does not rest in the
spaces themselves, but in the roles they play, in how they mirror, distort, or
disrupt the world around them. These in-between places hold a tension, a quiet,
creative friction, where history brushes up against the present. My
own works linger in these spaces: reflective, layered with memory, caught
between past impressions and unfolding now. As an artist, I absorb the
external, the fleeting, the flawed, the tempting, the mundane, and transmute it
inward, into meaning, into form.
Perhaps artists themselves reside in a kind of utopic threshold, a liminal state of
becoming, forever navigating a space of transient reflection, neither arriving
nor departing, but always moving.
Brnic, T. Autonomous. 2017. Oils
on canvas. (1300x900x40mm)
The car as a liminal mobile space reflects on the quiet residue of displacement. Combining installation and self-portraiture, the work traces a personal journey through time and place, where fragments of the past linger in constructed space, both real and remembered. Here autonomy is not independence, but fragile illusion of direction in a landscape of dislocation. The absence of a figure, coupled with the overwhelming visual data of urban reflections and mechanical design, speaks to the artists own sense of dislocation and reassembly. This is not a painting of a car. It is a painting of navigating absence, the ghost architecture of belonging. The shattered almost cubist angle of the car interior merges memory and machine.
Brnic,
T. Serenity in the Mundane - An Interior Heterotopia. 2019. Oils on canvas. (1300x900x40mm)
Centers on the healing and grounding nature of everyday ritual chores, a metaphysical presence, visually exploring interior/exterior space and self-reflection. The tiled walls whisper in their reflection of the everyday.
Brnic,
T. Push
Happy Pills - A Heterotopia of Surreal Confrontations. 2018. Oils on
canvas. (1300x900x40mm)
Explores the tension between outward composure and internal unrest. Fragmented imagery and layered brushwork reflect the pressure to present a curated self, while quietly questioning the rituals we adopt to cope with modern life.
Brnic, T. Window Shopper - Urban Reflections. 2019. Oils
on canvas. (1300x900x40mm)
Investigates themes of reflection, a heterotopia of urban nostalgia and fragmented identity. Construct of reality through self-insertion and manipulation of urban imagery, particularly Johannesburg’s skyline. Creating a space of transition, illusion and multiple realities. This piece juxtaposes multiple incompatible spaces in one location (the external urban skyline and the interior of a storefront). Creating a ripple in reality where rules end, identities shift and the familiar becomes strange.
Brnic,
T. Relucence - A Reflective Heterotopia.
2018. Oils on canvas. (1300x900x40mm)
Explores the philosophical concept of 'relucence', the reflective interplay between life and the external world. Drawing from Heidegger and Vinegar's interpretations, the work emphasizes that the world is not separate from the self but intertwined through visual and experiential reflection. Like Foucault's metaphor, the use of reflection captures an elsewhere, the world seen and felt through the self. The viewer is welcomed to peer into the eternal now, where the world gleams back as a construct.
