THE COSTUME HAS A CRACK IN IT

There is a category of person – bureaucrat, officer, executive, host – whose entire authority depends on our agreement not to ask what‘s underneath the uniform. Milunović‘s paintings are what happens when someone asks anyway.

Walk through this exhibition and you will meet very few people. You will meet a great many surfaces standing where people are supposed to be: a suit with no one inside it, a black oval balanced on a chair where a torso should sit, a figure whose face has simply been withheld, a crowd of clowns doing violence to a filing cabinet. Milunović has spent this body of work removing the person and leaving the role standing – and then, almost against his own better judgment, letting something escape from inside it anyway. A hand reaches out of the black hole toward a stack of bricks. A woman keeps writing, unbothered, while a costume war breaks out three feet from her desk. Something is always leaking out of the costume. That leak is the whole exhibition.

It would be easy – too easy – to call this a critique of institutions, of power, of the suits and desks and briefing rooms that recur across the canvases like a stage set that never quite gets struck. But Milunović is not an angry painter, and this is not an angry show. He has lived through actual history – a childhood inside a country that dissolved, a family that crossed the lines history insisted on drawing, cities and languages accumulated rather than chosen – and something in that history seems to have inoculated him against easy contempt for the people who dress up and perform seriousness. He knows better than most that the uniform is often the only thing holding a person together. So the suits in this show are not villains. They are simply hollow, the way most performances of authority are hollow, and he paints that hollowness with something closer to tenderness than accusation.

What he is actually interested in – and this is the intellectual spine running under all the artworks-is a much older and quieter question: what is the relationship between what we perceive and what is actually there? Philosophers have circled this for centuries. Kant argued we never see the thing itself, only the thing as filtered through the machinery of our own minds. Merleau-Ponty went further and said perception isn‘t even passive reception – it‘s an act, something the body does, shaped by everything the body has already lived through. Education, upbringing, the media saturating a given decade – all of it arrives before the eye does, pre-loading the interpretation before the interpretation has had a chance to happen. A clown means one thing. A brick means another. A man in a suit means authority, competence, trust – right up until you notice, as Milunović keeps forcing you to notice, that there‘s no one in the suit at all, and it commanded your trust anyway.

This is not a new anxiety, but it has never been more urgent, because we now live inside machines built specifically to generate images faster than perception can verify them. Milunović was asking these questions with a paintbrush long before anyone needed to ask whether a photograph was real. But the fact that he got there first doesn‘t make the questions less pressing now – if anything, painting them by hand, slowly, over months, is its own quiet argument: that the antidote to a world of instant, synthetic images might simply be looking at one image for a very long time, and letting it look back.

Scale is his other great instrument, and it is doing more philosophical work here than it first appears to. Two figures meet on a plinth inside a room built at a scale no human body could ever justify. A man holds a horse‘s reins behind curved glass while an entire cave system, dense with mineral growth, glows beneath his feet, utterly invisible to him. Three small figures raise torches on a coffee table as though performing a ceremony that predates the furniture around them by ten thousand years. Milunović keeps shrinking people down against their own architecture, and I don‘t read this as belittling. I read it as accurate, and quietly comic. We are not the authors of the rooms we occupy – not really. We inherited the institutions, the office towers, the conference rooms, the whole vocabulary of seriousness, and then we climbed inside them and started performing as though we‘d built them ourselves. Milunović‘s paintings simply restore the correct proportions. We are small. The rooms are large. The performance continues regardless.

There is a psychological reading available here too, and it runs close to something Erving Goffman wrote decades ago about social life as theater – the idea that identity itself is a performance we give for an audience, backstage and front-stage selves, the mask that eventually becomes indistinguishable from the face. Milunović‘s empty suits and faceless figures are Goffman‘s theory taken one uncomfortable step further: what if the audience stopped noticing there was no performer at all, and kept responding to the costume regardless? The suit still commands a room. The uniform still gets saluted. The monolith still gets addressed as though it might answer. We are, it turns out, remarkably willing to negotiate with an empty chair as long as it‘s dressed correctly.

And yet – this is the part I keep returning to, and the part that makes this a hopeful body of work rather than a cynical one – every single painting leaves an exit. The hand reaching from the black hole toward the bricks. The woman who keeps writing her own sentence regardless of the chaos performing itself around her. The small figure who catches fire on a fast-food tray, silver balloons spelling eighteen floating behind it at what is, ostensibly, a birthday party, and who is – depending entirely on how you choose to read it – dying, transforming, or simply what a childhood looks like from the inside as it burns down to make room for whatever comes next. Milunović never resolves these images into a single meaning, and I don‘t think this is evasiveness. I think it‘s a form of respect. He is one of the more genuinely educated people I have encountered in this field – multilingual, widely read, someone who has clearly spent real time with philosophy, psychology, and art history rather than sampling them decoratively – and that education shows up not as name-dropping but as restraint. He knows enough to know that a fixed answer would be smaller than the question. So he gives you the costume, the crack in the costume, and the choice of what‘s coming through it, and he trusts you to be intelligent enough to sit with the ambiguity rather than demanding he resolve it for you.

If I had to say, in the end, what this exhibition believes – because I do think a body of work can hold a belief, separate from any single image in it – it would be something like this: that human beings are essentially decent, curious, reaching creatures who have built extraordinarily elaborate costumes for ourselves out of fear, habit, and inherited history, and that the costumes have gotten so convincing we occasionally forget we‘re wearing them. Milunović doesn‘t ask us to burn the costumes down. He just paints the seam where the person and the performance come apart, briefly, and lets the light get in through it. That seam – not the bricks, not the suits, not even the fire – is the actual subject of this exhibition. Everything else is furniture.

Jovana Ilić, Curator