Adam Cvijanovic

Drawing inspiration from Renaissance fresco painting, Adam Cvijanovic’s ‘portable murals’ depict contemporary landscapes with a sense of celestial awe. Spanning 75 feet, Cvijanovic’s Love Poem captures the dreamy and disquieting essence of suburban Americana as a rapturous science fiction tableau. Envisioning sun-bleached L.A. ten minutes after the end of gravity, Cvijanovic’s utopia ascends in a whirlwind of consumerist ecstasy. Emulating movie backdrops as well as the acclivous perspective of cathedral dome tromp l’oiels, Love Poem… combines the sublime horror of disaster films with a majestic religiosity, as bungalows, Broncos, and palm trees are destroyed in the exaltation of their own perfectness. Painted entirely by the artist without assistants, on a plastic used by Fed Ex, Cvijavovic’s work reconstitutes the intimacy of timeless artistry with a modern day immediacy.

Adam Cvijanovic doesn’t work from photographs, his invented compositions arise from the familiarity of internalised images. Using the same subject matter as Sassy Sally, Show Boat renders a smaller version of fairground aftermath. Painted in oil on board, Cvijanovic offers surrealism with a fixed visual logic. Set in a nowhere landscape, his festival remnants are made monolithic, each creating a sense of heightened spatialawareness via multiple vanishing points and extreme perspective. Rendered with the faded tones of American nostalgia, Cvijanovic envisions a ghost town of bygone delights and tawdry amusement.

Stemming from his former job as a commercial muralist, Adam Cvijanovic’s paintings combine pop kitsch with the gravitas of historical painting. Completely self-taught, Cvijanovic approaches painting with an unconventional process: using a variety of acrylic and latex household paints on Tyvek, his vast images become transportable frescoes, giant architectural interventions that can be remodelled to fit various gallery spaces. Subverting the utopian connotations of monumental painting, Cvijanivic’s tableaux embrace the serene and idyllic while portraying haunting scenes of desolation.