PURGATORIJ and Do you (I) feel lucky?

In the works of Robert Šimrak, the painting is a collision point between high painterly craft and the visual language of mass media. His method begins with recognisable signs of collective everyday life – comics, film, advertising, brands, logos, and industrial symbolism – which he transposes into a precisely constructed scene, simultaneously seductive and unsettling. Aesthetics here is the bait: what at first glance appears 'clean' and virtuosic, in the background opens questions of power, violence, control, and values. This digital exhibition brings together two cycles that can be read as a continuous sequence. From the rhetorical question of luck and risk to a contemporary 'purgatory' of concrete and systems, Šimrak constructs a visual chronicle in which reality and simulation, progress and destruction, the individual and the mechanisms that surpass him alternate. 1) PURGATORIJ (2024–2025) Purgatorij presents monumental concrete landscapes and cold architectures — dystopian visions that function as the 'normalised' landscape of our time. It is a world in which civilisation reveals itself through its material: through constructions, grids, systems, and the scenography of power. In this cycle, Šimrak brings to a culmination his long-standing exploration of the relationship between the individual and the system, reality and simulation, progress and destruction — and the paintings become mirrors in which the crisis of contemporary man, technology, and social values is refracted. In this purgatory there are no grand gestures of salvation: only the stubborn presence of form. Occasionally, figures resembling guards of ruins appear — uniforms without genuine power, 'shadows of power' — as if the system, even after defeat, continues to reproduce its own signs. The result is a powerful visual chronicle: aesthetically monumental yet ethically restless, with a question echoing behind every concrete frame — what are we willing to lose in order to maintain the semblance of order? 2) Do you (I) feel lucky? (2015) The cycle departs from a question that sounds almost cinematic, yet quickly turns into an existential test: who is 'lucky', and who is merely temporarily spared? In this register, the figure of death also appears — not as a metaphysical distance, but as the protagonist of a contemporary scene: cold, at times grotesquely cheerful, as if cheering for its own efficacy. The language is often close to comics — a clear contour, an even stroke, a scene as a frame that is not forgotten. The titular theme of 'luck' here is not optimistic; it is a measure of risk, dependency, and the price we pay for safety, comfort, or the illusion of control. The viewer remains in tension between the allure of the image and the discomfort of the content: as if asking the same question as the title — but without a certain answer.