The exhibition of Mirza Čizmić and Marko Crnobrnja at Aleksić Gallery is conceived as a spatial dialogue between painting and sculpture, but above all as a meeting of two artistic universes that insist on figuration as a language through which contemporary reality is shaped. Their practices do not function in opposition, but in a regime of mutual mirroring: while Crnobrnja, through his wooden sculptures, constructs miniature scenic dramas, Čizmić develops painterly narratives that employ grotesque, irony, and hyperbole to destabilize the boundary between the everyday and the phantasmagorical. Crnobrnja begins with the material—wood, which in his hands becomes both archaic and contemporary, stripped of illusionistic realism yet charged with symbolic intensity. His figures, often placed on tables, chairs, or improvised pedestals, resemble fragments of a stage, as though the viewer were witnessing a frozen performance. They carry gestures and expressions that evoke universal situations: waiting, encounter, conflict, dialogue. Their theatricality is deliberate—the sculptures operate as “props” of the collective unconscious, summoning both intimate and social experiences. In this sense, titles such as “Hajde da ne zovemo muriju” (Let’s Not Call the Cops) or “Koalicija” (Coalition) underscore the ironic and political charge of his works, where everyday speech becomes an entry point into serious social themes. “Kad ako ne sad” (If Not Now, When) opens the question of urgency and decisive action, while “Kosi tata kosim ja” (Dad Mows, I Mow Too) employs humor and the naivety of childhood language as a key to understanding generational legacy and the repetition of patterns. Of particular significance is “Vavilonska kula” (Tower of Babel), which invokes the mythic narrative of linguistic confusion and affirms the artist’s relationship to continuity and cultural memory. Each work thus functions as a small scenic fragment, but only together in space do they create Crnobrnja’s specific “theater of sculpture.” “Sculpture is always, above all, a fact of presence. It is not the image of a body but its extension into space.” – Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) Čizmić’s canvases, by contrast, explode in the field of narration. His painterly language merges elements of pop culture, comicbook humor, citations from everyday life, and recognizable cultural symbols, constructing scenes that are at once satirical and disturbingly realistic. His paintings bear titles that themselves function as ironic commentaries on reality—from “What the Flowers Saw” and “Public Landscape”, where nature and space assume the role of observers of social absurdity, to “Interrogation Room No. 34011945”, which evokes the bureaucratic logic of control and repression. Titles such as “I Love You Mamma (Paraphrase)” or “Pussycat” introduce registers of intimacy and tenderness, yet grotesque imagery unsettles them, turning affection into uneasy parody. Works like “Lion King” and “The Good Shepherd, Part II” summon mythic and religious tropes, while situating them in banal, often absurd contexts of contemporary life. “Metamorphosis (Replica)” reveals the artist’s tendency to return to the same motifs, with each version functioning as a renewed inquiry into the meaning and boundaries of painting. “Poetic Silence, Sun and the Walking Cat” exemplifies Čizmić’s capacity to balance the idyllic and the grotesque, where a scene of nature becomes an uncanny dream in which poetry turns into unease. Through this interplay of titles and images, Čizmić produces layered narratives in which contemporaneity reveals itself as an absurd and paradoxical drama. “The grotesque is not merely comic or eerie: it is a way of showing the world as both order and chaos, reality and its parody.” – Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957) What unites both artists is their insistence on the figure as a language of resistance. In a time of fragmented identities and the dominance of abstract visual codes within digital reality, Čizmić and Crnobrnja bring the figure back to the forefront as a central site of negotiation with the world. In Crnobrnja’s work, the figure remains rooted “in the body” and in space, in its material presence and vulnerability. In Čizmić’s, the figure is drawn into the pictorial field as into an arena where contemporary myths, grotesques, and absurdities unfold. Within the exhibition space of Aleksić Gallery, these two languages converge and complement each other. Sculpture, with its physicality, grounds the space, giving it tactile rhythm and shaping the viewer’s movement. Painting, with its narrative excesses, opens the space toward an infinite production of meanings and projections. In the tension between threedimensional mass and pictorial narration, a field emerges in which the viewer becomes an active participant—invited to interpret, connect, and uncover. The dialogue between Mirza Čizmić and Marko Crnobrnja is not merely a formal encounter of painting and sculpture, but a theater in which contemporary experience itself is refracted. Their works, despite their different vocabularies, share the same ontological gesture: the insistence that the figure still carries the power to embody memory, irony, violence, tenderness, and absurdity. This is not the figure as passive presence, but as actor, protagonist, and witness. In Crnobrnja’s sculptures, the figure stands upon its pedestal like a wager in a stage play, exposed in its material vulnerability and corporeal presence. In Čizmić’s paintings, the figure is thrown into visual chaos, into grotesque and paradoxical narratives where the banal and the mythical stand side by side. Together, in their shared space, they give rise to a Stage of Absurdity: a scene in which contemporary life reveals itself in the full spectrum of its contradictions. Here, between the wooden figure and the painterly grotesque, between the material and the imaginary, between what is and what might be, art discovers its most radical force—not to offer consolation, but to lucidly and brutally expose reality. Dejan Aleksic