Single Frame Journal #2

Primitive_RE Battling Watercolors

Damn scroll-stopper. It hit me instantly. Got hooked by a cold slap from the past. Like one of those lingering thoughts that, if ignored, only feeds a monster. I’ll admit—this is a form of narcissism I consciously accept—that I always find myself in works I love. And this artist makes me feel like Narcissus himself, staring back at my own reflection.

Everything starts with the central anthropomorphic figure, a signature compositional move of Sinisa’s, which in one way or another reminds me of a self that is always self-referential, caught in liminal stages of self-knowledge, aching for a bit of rest. That lead feet syndrome—that sense of having tried everything and nothing worked, living inside the rhetoric that everything’s right around the corner but the street stretches on forever.

One can lift weights outside of prison too—you don’t need to make a public performance out of tearing muscle fibers. That’s what this piece evokes IMO: the feeling of a solo climber pushing on with no guarantees. It makes me relive impostor syndrome in a therapeutic way, but tbh I don’t know if the artist himself, in the act of creating, consciously felt it to be therapeutic—rather later, when the work was done. Because yes, maybe for some time nothing worked… until it did.

The metaphor of battling with watercolors is perfectly fitting. Watercolors are probably the most dynamic of all traditional painting mediums, constantly in dialogue with time itself. Every gesture, every stroke requires immediacy and presence. You can’t run away, you can’t lie, because the evidence is right there: pigments dried into textured paper, long after the last drop of “patience” has evaporated.

Too little room for do-overs. Too much overpainting, and the sheet tears. Too much hesitation, and the moment dries up before your eyes, leaving nothing behind. Battling Watercolors interpreted as a metaphor for impostor syndrome.