Aljeks

Imitation of certain human behavior patterns on the internet does not guarantee that the person behind the profile is truly real. Cyborgs and various forms of artificial intelligence dominate online spaces. The need for the real world, a genuine face, self, tangible and material beings and things seems to be growing. In this narrative, the question arises: What is the real world? The fact is that we are no longer able to imagine offline life. Online life, not only being an everyday reality for each of us but also becoming the place of our natural habitat, where we feel free, unrestricted, mostly uncensored, and where we are allowed to be anyone. Is this really our reality? Can we choose one of the many avatars and present ourselves as that? Is it possible to create our own identity on the internet without it being a false image of an idealized life we desire or an ironic comment on the understanding of the complexity of this discourse through the intentional creation of characters highly susceptible to internet culture? Either way, our trace is indelible and eternal in the sea of infinite codes on the web. Aleksa Jovanović uses his virtual alter ego to convey a complex array of emotions, events, phenomena, and social and political constraints. In this series of works, we encounter the repetition of the motif of the human face, mostly depicted frontally, using artificial colors that are opposite to the natural appearance of human skin. The facial expressions in self-portraits and portraits are just as artificial as the colors, which give them a sense of frozenness and ambiguity when it comes to identifying the emotions they carry. These are mostly smiles, frowns, or sad expressions, but these are the easiest categories at first glance to assign to the presented feelings. Smiling figures exude horror, and it soon becomes increasingly difficult to make a distinction between pleasure, shock, fear, hysteria, or malice. The artist creates something perishable, something that can be physically destroyed, something that is not forever engraved in internet footprints. These works represent the embodiment of the masks we wear in online presentation but also in direct and immediate human communication. The only clear division between these two aspects is visible in all aspects: the gray and darker tones that prevail in the depictions of the dead are juxtaposed with the bright and "living" colors in depictions of the living figures. The expressions of the deceased are liberated from masks (social or personal), they are entirely real because that is all they have left. Transience, oblivion, death, and impermanence are elements that connect both parts of this frameless series of paintings on paper with rough pastel strokes that oscillate between the traditional function of depicting the human figure and its contemporary counterpart whose existence is conditioned by social networks. The artist would not be able to approach the photographs of unknown deceased people without the modern tools of the internet, which both inherit and make accessible every aspect of human life, even what happens after it. Death on the internet is cruel, often sensationalistically represented, and full of unnecessary content. Tragedies, accidents, crimes, and human bodies are one click away from all of us in these environments. It seems as if even the dead must play a role, be under a mask, or in the position of an alter ego to protect their body and mind. Aleksa critically addresses this phenomenon and in some way liberates all his characters (dead or alive, but also himself) by giving them individual space, especially seen in the animation that lacks details, where now-familiar faces coexist in an undefined, perhaps nonexistent environment. They acquire a second dimension, no longer just immobile and somewhat sinister figures on the walls, but participants in aimless actions that are repeated over and over in this work, which subtly poses the rhetorical question: Does our true face even exist?

Text for the exhibition "Aljeks" written by curator and art historian Bojana Jovanovic