HUNTING SHADOWS by Veljko Vučković
Curated by WHY NAT
ARIA ART GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of HUNTING SHADOWS, a solo exhibition by Veljko Vučković, on Friday, April 24 at 7:00 PM at Borgo Santi Apostoli 40r, Florence, Italy. The exhibition is curated and organized in collaboration with WHY NAT Projects.
According to the curator, Nataša Radojević, the exhibition brings together a new body of work, marking a significant shift in both scale and conceptual scope within Vučković’s painterly practice.
While politically engaged European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s remains a key reference, the new works also draw on film noir and film gris, expanding the visual and atmospheric range of the paintings. The exhibition also maintains a dialogue with Italian cinema, including crime films, creating a resonance between the works and their presentation context.
These influences introduce new motifs and narrative tensions while sustaining the artist’s ongoing exploration of power, ambiguity, and image construction.
The paintings are grounded in the transformation of cinematic material: film stills are digitally manipulated and then translated into painting, shifting from reproducible image to singular object. In this process, images become nomadic, moving across media while retaining traces of their origin. Digital preparation is combined with a direct, often continuous painterly gesture, allowing the image to emerge through a balance of control and contingency. His process involves selecting and deconstructing film frames, followed by extensive digital editing, montage, collage, and alteration, before transferring the image onto canvas. Footage is often reduced to black and white; elements are removed, repositioned, or fragmented; contrast and lighting are reworked; and occasional textual interventions are introduced. This method operates with near-archaeological precision, as fragments are examined, reorganized, and materialized through oil painting.
The resulting works resist fixed meanings, instead opening a multivalent field of interpretation. Rather than delivering a singular message, they move from the deconstruction of the familiar toward the construction of new perceptual possibilities. Situated between their source and their transformation, the paintings enable a convergence of meanings in which the artist assumes the role of investigator, and the viewer completes the interpretive process.
