Mourning the Red Cactus by Danilo Stojanović installation view
There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To confront what we bury is not to destroy the self, but to finally see it.Danilo Stojanović
The Mourning the Red Cactus explores the thresholds of self-awareness, duality, and the metaphysical dimensions of human consciousness through haunting and psychologically charged imagery.
Stojanović’s artistic practice is rooted in the exploration of the “double status” of being—an ontological limbo between opposing forces: visibility and concealment, desire and loss, life and death. Painting serves as his conduit for expressing these paradoxes. His compositions are imbued with a psychological fluidity, evoking a space where emotional and cognitive states shift between clarity and confusion.
Referencing António Damasio’s concept of somatic markers—emotional cues that influence human decision-making—Stojanović constructs visual environments where such internal markers begin to emerge. Equally significant is the Freudian notion of the uncanny, a sensation where the familiar becomes unsettling. In these works, the familiar repressed resurfaces, destabilizing one’s perception of self and other.
Through symbolic gestures, eerie forms, and fractured intimacy, Stojanović captures the raw essence of being: a state haunted by memory and the unconscious, by mourning and rebirth. The exhibition ultimately evokes a “pleasurable suffering,” a search for the elemental human core as entangled with earth, history, and hidden desires.