By Sara Bright
Ratko Torma paints the inside of a head as if it were a landscape you could walk into. The Serbian artist has been working on his series Mental Constructions since 2017, and its subject is exactly what the title promises: the thoughts, fears and beliefs we build, and then have to live inside.
In Mental Constructions (2018) the same long-haired man appears four times on one canvas. One figure reaches through a hole broken in a brick wall towards his double, who holds a trowel and a hammer, so it is never clear whether the wall is going up or coming down. Another stands on a stepladder and paints butterflies into a sky strung with barbed wire, while a clock face shatters beside him and shows a night sky inside the cracks. To the right a storm carries the head of a snarling black beast, and the fourth figure sits alone on cracked earth with his head on his knees. The green field and the dry ground meet under his feet.
Add some color to the world (2020), shown at the top of this page, turns the same idea towards hope. A girl crouches on grey, cracked asphalt and opens a pink holdall, and a world pours out of it: meadows, a path into the hills, a castle, a hot-air balloon, pink clouds. Behind her the other half of the picture stays grey and only half drawn, with tower blocks, figures in protective suits and an overturned playground roundabout, while a starry sky breaks through the corner like shattered glass. A bird flies from the colour into the grey, and a single dandelion has already come up through a crack.
Torma works in oil on canvas, and his background in restoration and icon painting shows in the finish. The surfaces are smooth and patient, and the recurring symbols, the universe and barbed wire among them, are painted with the same care as the faces. Both canvases measure 70 by 100 centimetres.
More of his work is at ratkotorma.art and on Instagram.
