DANIJEL RADIC

“How much self-will is still fun?” Hermann Hesse might ask in today’s times. The freelance artist and designer Danijel Radić confronts the contemporary, almost universal desire for self-staging through self-staging itself.

Demonstratively, he engages with the interplay between self-presentation and self-perception. In a striking way, he demonstrates the intimate exposure of the soul as an act of masking the body. Between revelation and disguise, between authenticity and camouflage, the images operate within the tension of self-image and external perception.

The selfie offers a mirror surface for society’s self-questioning. Each shot is not only a self-portrait, but also an invitation to observation—a silent negotiation of how we want to be seen and how we see ourselves. The pulse of the times and of society resounds as the heartbeat of the individual in reflection with its essential questions.

Visibility, self-presentation, self-staging have been elevated to contemporary criteria of (being someone) or not being. In art, the self-portrait has always existed, regarded at least since the Renaissance as an independent art genre, and today it has arrived as an instrument of self-construction in all social strata. But what drives this urge for self-representation? Does our heart beat faster when we see ourselves? Is it the eternal striving for self-knowledge—or an evolutionarily conditioned survival strategy?

In times of selfies and digital image streams, where algorithms distribute power-suggesting visibility and invisible rules determine supposed opportunities, the face becomes a stage, the pose a message, the look a statement, the gaze a currency. The selfie becomes an icon. At the center, seemingly, stands the human being—but primarily the question of how he actively shows and presents himself in order to be actively-passively seen. The subject has long since become its own object. Intimacy functions as an end in itself. Behind it slumbers the silent cry for recognition of one’s own search for identity: “Look at me, this is me, I am—many.”

In the offering of observation lies, despite all vulnerability, the possibility of being touched, of feeling oneself—whether through recognition or rejection. The permanent self-gaze serves the hope of catching, through the eyes of the other, a glimpse of oneself.

In his work “Me, Myself & I”, Danijel Radić paraphrases the human being in the perpetual struggle for attention and interpretative authority over the self-image, in the attempt to determine the external image. For as social beings we have, to paraphrase Sartre, in the gaze of the Other the possibility to recognize ourselves.