It is always the middle of the night in Stipan Tadić’s painted worlds, and the paintings exhibited in Split, at Loggia Centar (curated by Patricia Pocanić) and Berlino (curated by Michelle Houston) confirm this. The bleary-eyed nighthawks in Tadić’s work populate the streets, the subways and lonely apartments of a largely sleeping metropolis. Even when there is no visible human protagonist, you know they are there, whether behind one of the endless illuminated windows in Ideal City, a NYC housing block reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, or in a solitary studio apartment.

Stipan Tadić, “Subway Sleep”, 2019, 30 x 20 cm, reverse glass painting; “On the Corner”, 2021, 152 x 112 cm, oil on canvas. Ph courtesy the Artist

These depictions are, for the most part, New York City neighborhoods which are also those of the nocturnal city of Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and Martin Scorsese’s 1985 black comedy, After Hours, in which an unknowing data entry worker named Paul (played by Griffin Dunne) finds himself trapped downtown. Scorsese’s anti-hero is trying to escape from a maze, while Tadić’s anti-hero, whether the rat glaring at us from his lair inside an overflowing garbage can or the bleary-eyed facemask wearer staring back at us from the corner bodega. In After Hours, there is a caged rat in one scene where Paul finds himself trapped in a talkative woman’s apartment, just one stop along a path plotted out as an epic journey of trap doors, behind each another compartment holding out the promise of a particular experience.

Stipan Tadić, “The Room”, 2021, 250 x 150 cm, oil on canvas; “Doomed”, 2021-22, 36 x 26 cm, watercolor and gouache on paper. Ph courtesy the Artist

Tadić’s deploys his own sequences of nesting scenes where each image contains icons, openings and portals to further worlds. In The Room, we see inside an archetypal East Village studio apartment. If you have lived in NYC you know this kind of place: the rooms are small, the 100 year-old building is falling apart and inside, there is a mess. This must be a single artist guy living in The Room, visible even in his absence with clothes on the floor, cigarettes, a vodka bottle, Thomas Bernhard’s The Woodcutter, and a laptop open to a game of Solitaire. Like the windows, globes or maps used in 17^th century paintings by Johannes Vermeer to open metaphorical as well as visual spaces in otherwise cramped interiors, Tadić opens windows to create spaces within spaces through illuminated laptops whose screens connect the otherwise solitary dwellers to distant relatives, real and imagined friends. Tadić’s painted windows, icons, screens reveal the artist’s affinity for desktop gaming, a painter equally at home with slow carefully built glazed surfaces as he is with having multiple tabs open at once. These come together in Doomed, via a line of icons and statistics across the bottom edge of which detail the status bar from the 1990’s game Doom.

Stipan Tadić, “Ideal City”, 2020-2022, 100 x 135 cm, oil on canvas. Ph courtesy the Artist

Released almost 30 years ago, Doom is still considered one of the most defining in video game history. If you played video games in the early ’90s, you most definitely played Doom.  There is very little plot in Doom: you play as a marine on Mars fighting demons. The Doom manual tells you that the military is secretly doing teleportation experiments and so the protagonist, the Doom guy, is stationed on the moon Phobos. All of his team have died and he has to fight his way through by shooting demons to reach checkpoints and advance to the next level. As the game continues, hidden rooms are revealed which can lead to better weapons or new enemies. Like Stipan Tadić’s paintings, Doom is filled with claustrophobic hallways rooms full of traps, each level playing more like a labyrinth and less like a linear sequence of events, requiring you to fully explore the lonely walkways to make it to the exits. In the aptly titled Doomed, an unseen protagonist is faced with a prototypical NYC subway scenario. With a forking hallway to choose from a set of stairs on the right or on the left, Uptown or Downtown, Express or Local, we have a daily (or nightly) set of choices and at night, on Tadić’s subway, we choose our own adventure. The game driven explanation for this narrative can be described as a problem saturated story, each step of the way presenting the protagonist, the player or the viewer with a set of choices to make, a challenge to meet, and a way to capture our interest until the next challenge.

Stipan Tadić “Self-portrait in Zagreb”, 2023, 51 x 41 cm, oil on canvas; “Snow in Brooklyn”, 2023, 76 x 61 cm, oil on canvas. Ph courtesy Loggia Centar, Split

When we come up from the subterranean maze of the glazed subway tiles, we run into a small cluster of city dwellers.  In On the Corner (an oil on canvas, dated 2021) we meet a small cohort of rats, dogs and people, late night dwellers looking at us through glazed eyes and backlit by the yellow light of their own set of icons, touchstones to brands and allegiances in the form of beer logos, and ATM’s. The whole scene is curved like the wide angle view of a corner store’s mirror, an all at once perspective picked up in Cobalt City, one of several ceramic vessels (made in collaboration with sculptor Hae Won Sohn) allowing the same sort of distortion of the painted bodega corner.

Hae Won Sohn + Stipan Tadić, “Cobalt City”, 2023, glazed stoneware. Ph courtesy Loggia Centar, Split

As much as Stipać’s paintings echo the sooty city of 19^th and 20^th century painters and printmakers, his work is equally informed by the graphic references of urban graphic novelists such as Ben Katchor and Chris Ware; notably in Ideal City, a large painting dominated by a NYC housing project, a 20^th century dystopian super tower offset by a cartouche of a 14^th century Florentine ideal city. Each of the illuminated windows is a portal to an individual life. Tadić’s  windows – whether you read them as references to 1990’s video games or advent calendars, use the visual motifs of the city – from its architecture and inhabitants to logos and painted graphics to create atlases of discovery for a city only visible in the middle of the night.

Nick Tobier

Info:

Group show, Love letters to the City
curated by Michelle Houston
13/09/2024 – 30/05/2027
Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
www.urban-nation.com
www.stipantadic.com

Juliet Art Magazine

is a contemporary art magazine since 1980