Radenko was born in 1980 in Travnik, Yugoslavia. Lives and works in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
So close and yet so far is a series of watercolors, created during 2014, where each piece refers to another event
across the space and time: the imagery of war and peace, art and culture, science and technology, natural and
human disasters, is merged into a sort of historical calendar covering all the continents without forgetting the
artist’s native Balkan peninsula and its significance for the First World War outbreak. Predominantly black and
white, these relatively small-scale static images resonate with the optical dynamics of early-modern motion
pictures. In a vertigo of seemingly unrelated sequences the travestied film-stills swallow our sense of reality: the
viewer is thrown onto his/her knees in front of a ‘surrealist’ setting that incorporates painterly traditions of realism
and abstraction inasmuch as it challenges (or even denies) the modernist image-making tout court.
Hence, So close and yet so far narrates stories that, for one reason or another, failed or happened to be diverted
from their original course of action. They contain suggestions of failure and vanity through which to look at the
entire world history from a perspective of both prophesies and tragedies, while maintaing one’s principal belief:
that, in this inevitable process, coming up with something “really new” may be a utopian yet the most beautiful
possible outcome.
