A large part of this body of work was done during my master studies at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts) in 2015, in the studio of a French painter and professor Philippe Cognée, and it was exhibited the same year at the Cultural Center of Serbia in Paris. Paintings from this series became a part of the permanent set design for a Serbian TV show called Agape, in 2016.

Visual structure of these paintings borrows ornaments from the Serbian traditional tapestry, which can be seen as an evolutionary stage of the Oriental tapestry. We only have fragments of the complete meaning of ornaments. Further scientific effort would enable a more complete understanding of the Serbian traditional tapestries. 

My childhood memories are filled with woven ornaments. They can be related to almost anything: concepts of life, death and beauty; feelings of mystery, adventure, fear and joy. I strated noticing tapestries around the same time I heard the old, Serbian expression hvatam zjale after which this series is named. Verb hvatam, hvatati means to catch, to grab. The word zjala is archaic. It means: hole, nothingness, emptiness, abyss, void, mouth cavity. It may also be related to Serbian verbs: zevati - to yawn, or zijati/zjati - to (idly) aimlessly stare (perhaps, with your mouth open). A person saying hvatam zjale wants to communicate that he or she is wasting their time (I’m sitting here doing nothing.). Zjale is a word that is not used often. When heard, we intuit that it’s archaic and it reminds us of, and even rhymes with the names of mythical creatures from Serbian folklore. To a child that hears the expression for the first time, it sort of sounds like someone’s  busy trying to catch some unknown entity. It’s a century old gag of an unknown prankster who gave the nothing a name and an entity, and found a way to say I’m doing nothing like he’s a man on a mission. Soothing name for a set of paintings with a seemingly pretentious concept.  

The chances of grasping the full meaning of the symbolism of old ornaments through the act of painting are equal to those of seizing the void. Nevertheless, that is how I tried to justify my artistic effort when my colleagues at ENSBA Paris, asked me Why are you spray-painting old ornaments in 2014?. I was being smug: My artistic effort might unlock a forgotten knowledge about my ancestors, some information which we all carry buried in our unconscious. This strategy is borrowed from the bag of contemporary artist’s tricks. It perverts the truth of nothing worth doing is ever easy, by relying on the fact that there is nothing harder than chasing the impossible. This logic further implies that unattainable goal brings absolute value. Vain and insecure artists hide behind the size of their cross. It is absurd to aim at a target you are bound to miss. Realizing my own deceitfulness, I named these paintings Zjale (holes, voids). It became a joke at my own expense, my vanity exposed.