Relja Penezic
Relja Penezic is a photorealistic painter who has exhibited his work internationally and his short films are regularly shown at film festivals throughout the world. His 2002 Audio/Video installation in collaboration with composer Victoria Jordanova at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art entitled Panopticon was published by ArpaViva label as a DVD and is distributed by Cinema Guild of New York. His paintings and media pieces are part of numerous private and public collections in the US, Europe and Japan. In 2004 he was selected by Alaska Arts Council to create a permanent media installation, The Alaska Cycle, a video landscape. In 2005 and 2006 he finished two large scale site specific paintings Alaska Time-Lapse and Views of Tundra for the Alaska Psychiatric Institute, commissioned by Alaska Arts Council.
In recent years, although known as a multimedia artist, Relja has been focused exclusively on realistic oil on canvas paintings, usually depicting urban landscapes such as highways. His most signature paintings depict the open terrain of the California desert with distant cars flashing by on the desolate highway. Many of his remote landscapes with their grainy atmosphere and sandstorms appear almost like scenes out of a post-apocalyptic landscape, such as in the Mad Max series of films.
Much like the works of James McNeill Whistler, Relja depicts atmosphere with subtle indications of light, structure, and grainy qualities depicted through rough brush strokes. The difference would be Relja’s photorealistic appearance of his paintings which may be mistaken for photographs or video stills while Whistler’s works appear more impressionistic. Although he depicts urban landscapes, the city buildings are far off in the distance, long driven past by the streaking vehicles in the paintings along desolate highways. Relja conveys a sense of emptiness and wanderer spirit in these works and a reflection of an autobiographical take of an artist who has lived and traveled to many parts of the world.
Nocturne (pictured above) remains one of Relja’s most unusual paintings with the landscape becoming extremely dark; as a result we cannot tell if the work represents a seascape or a desolate highway. The geometrical forms off in the distance are so vague they represent skyscrapers or perhaps ocean oil tankers. A photorealistic painting which also comes off as abstract, like a picture taken in the dark of night with nothing but perhaps the moonlight providing illumination.
Relja Penezic creates deeply isolated, desolate, and sober paintings which reflect a somber journey into the open unknown. He portrays open highways, parking lots, and even the revealing sky with a sense of adventure with sfumato techniques. With a great sense of precision and refined technique Relja Penezic takes the audience on a journey through remote, unfamiliar landscapes which evoke poetic contemplation and philosophical musing.
