Radenko Milak : Disappear here

Radenko Milak’s powerful watercolors capture and reflect the dramatic and
unprecedented images of a frozen world. Vividly rendered in black and white ink on
paper, the paintings chronicle the collective experience of quarantine and lockdown
during the global Covid-19 pandemic. Milak’s illustrations portray a scene that is
familiar but uncanny, a world suspended in time and space.

Milak’s images are a result of meticulous and systematic research conducted through
the immediate and constant flow of digital information. His practice examines images
of life during the pandemic and the consequences of a world put on hold. Equally
profound and mundane, the images are ones that were previously unimaginable, but
today contribute to a lasting measure of the excess of this global event.

The story of lockdown is a story of fragmentation, and Milak’s works highlight this
narrative of a known world that exists at the same time in totality and irremediably
divided. His images are scenes of social life disrupted in its most intimate aspects:
urban landscapes deserted of any presence, churches and holy places emptied of
their meaning, hospitals and morgues in overload, closed places of culture, airports,
and train stations without any possibility for departure… Milak guides us to see the
sweet and bitter absurdity of a daily life disrupted in even its most prosaic aspects.