The dialogue between high art and popular culture began more than half a century ago, perhaps most notably in the works of Pop Art artists. Since then, the dialogue has deepened, so that today it represents an accepted practice which no longer stands only between the two mentioned spheres, and which is not seen only as their consequence. Today, it is acceptable to use elements of pop culture in high art, but also to use complex meanings in popular culture, ie the meanings we read in the messages of high art. In the time in which we live, works of popular culture and design have become so present in everyday life that our perception is oversaturated. Modern man also uses pictures and icons in everyday communication, often replacing words with them. In addition to the fact that the production of images is incomparably higher today than ever before, and that man in the past centuries saw incomparably fewer images than today’s man sees in one day even, pictures can still leave strong impression on the observer, as for example frescoes of Masaccio from the beginning of the 15th century. Therefore, the field of visual culture imposes itself on the history of art as a competitive approach to the analysis of visual material. Although visual culture is not a science, but rather an academic discipline, it is useful because it takes into account not only works of high art, but also design, comics, film, video games, animation and music videos, trying to provide a more complete picture of the modern world. At the same time, nullifying boundaries of the two mentioned practices, uniting the space of high art and popular culture.

Somewhere in those spaces is Dejan Zivkovic, an author who is interested in the possibilities of connecting them not only through the montage of motifs, but much more in connecting methods and patterns. Before him many authors were on the field where he is, taking over the elements to which they gave a new reception – critical, symbolic, prophetic… Zivkovic is at the beginning of his career, and he is ready to examine this field looking for similarities between works of art, whose value has been confirmed by decades and centuries, and what in contemporary discourse is called not only visual culture, but sometimes screen culture. However, the author for his medium chooses the image as a permanent object, painted on canvas, and not an illusory and changeable thing, such as the character on the screen. In that sense, we expect new interpretations of characters and situations from the author, which, although they do not date back to ancient times, seem to possess the qualities of archetypes.

*published 2016