Automobiles

In the cycle "Automobiles", Matko Vekić treats the car as a contemporary portrait — not an object, but a figure. His car bodies, bonnets and shattered windscreens are painted with the same attention and density once reserved for the human face: every brushstroke seeks not form but character, weight, the trace of time. Through a gestural, earthy palette — black, olive, ochre, muted pink — Vekić builds paintings in which the recognisable model (BMW, Mercedes, Peugeot, an old Zastava) wavers constantly between figuration and abstraction. Paint is applied thickly, scraped and wiped away, leaving the visible layers of process; the painting wrestles with its motif just as the car wrestles with the time that corrodes it. In this cycle, the wreck and the gleaming luxury model are not opposites but two phases of a single scene. One is memory, the other a promise; one is what remains, the other what is yet to remain. Between them, Vekić raises questions about consumption, status, masculine identity and the quiet melancholy of the everyday objects we look at daily but rarely truly see. "Automobiles" invites us to pause before what we have grown used to dismissing as banal — and to recognise, in sheet metal, lacquer and rust, a portrait of our own time.