CRYPTOMNESIA

The term Cryptomnesia, introduced by Carl Gustav Jung, describes the return of a forgotten idea disguised as a new one. What appears as invention is often the resurfacing of images previously absorbed and silently stored within the mind.

In Filip Mirazović’s work, painting operates through this mechanism. Images emerge from a visual field shaped by art history, cinema, literature, design, and lived experience. These sources are neither quoted nor reproduced; they are transformed, recomposed, and absorbed into a new pictorial language. What appears on the canvas occupies a hybrid state where recollection and invention become indistinguishable. A key structural influence in Mirazović’s practice is Mannerism, the historical moment when the equilibrium of Renaissance painting gives way to tension, elongation, and psychological intensity. Figures stretch, twist, and stabilize within carefully constructed compositions. For the artist, the lineage of painters such as Titian, Veronese, Andrea del Sarto, and Bronzino functions not as stylistic reference but as a method for constructing bodies that carry symbolic and emotional pressure. The figures in these paintings are not portraits of individuals but allegorical bodies. Each character embodies a condition rather than a narrative identity. Virtue and corruption, refinement and excess, control and dissolution coexist within the same form. Identity appears unstable, shaped by inherited roles, expectations, and cultural mythologies. Objects and domestic interiors are central to the pictorial logic of the works. Cabinets, televisions, shelves, and furniture, often recalling the distinctive design language of Eastern European homes from the 1970s and 1980s, appear repeatedly throughout the paintings. These structures do not operate as background, they function as frameworks that hold fragments of lived experience. VHS tapes, screens, and familiar domestic forms appear within them, suspended between personal history, cultural reference, and symbolic architecture. Within these interiors the body itself becomes a material surface. In works such as Nero or Don Giovanni, figures appear composed of materials that belong as much to the tradition of painting as to physical reality: gilded frames, marble, porcelain, cracked leather, or viscous black matter. The body becomes a site where cultural identity, psychological tension, and allegory converge. The painting Cryptomnesia, which gives the exhibition its title, extends this logic into a more explicitly autobiographical composition. At its center stands a large piece of furniture typical of Yugoslav domestic interiors, functioning as a visual archive of the past. Around it, objects associated with childhood and media culture, VHS tapes, film titles, fragments of design, coexist with symbols of artistic aspiration and mortality. The composition unfolds like a suspended dream in which personal memory, cultural imagery, and historical reference occupy the same pictorial space.

Across the exhibition, Mirazović constructs a personal mythology shaped by family history, cultural inheritance, and the slow sedimentation of images over a lifetime. The language of classical painting provides the underlying structure, while the themes that emerge, desire, power, identity, and mortality, remain fundamentally timeless. Descartes once wrote Larvatus prodeo, “I advance masked.” In Mirazović’s paintings, each figure advances in precisely this way: presenting a visible form while concealing layers of history and contradiction beneath its surface.