Scenes of seemingly simple pleasures and happy memories by Croatian artist Martina Grlić (previously featured here). Born and currently based in Zagreb, Grlić’s practice explores the politics of remembrance and reimagines everyday objects tied to female experience. Her paintings merge clear memories with surreal elements to prompt reflection on personal and cultural histories. While everything may seem harmless and familiar at first, Grlić demonstrates how the further one delves into their own recollections, how quickly the solidity of the stories we’ve always told ourselves fall away. “Saccharine Idyll” draws attention to the ways in which we come to rely on certain narratives, not simply for pleasure, but in order to live—to make sense of the world and even ourselves. And what happens when we start to interrogate the hollowness of that truth. Coming to terms with the deceptiveness of memory, Grlić’s paintings signal that the pastel idyll is not reliable, exposing the cultural mechanisms that lie beneath:
“My entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.”
“Saccharine Idyll” is on display at Trotoar Gallery until November 8th.
