Published
Visitors
Goran Bertok’s series The Visitors hinted at guidelines of an artistic development that focuses on obsessive documentation and staging of body transience without any pathos or moralizations: after its physical death, the body merely remains a doomed dead piece of meat. Thus the motifs of burning corpses in abstracted spacelessness represent a naturalist, yet completely aestheticized document on the omnipresent cremating procedure, hidden carefully from the public eye.
The Visitors represent the absolute margin, a retreat, because Bertok does not picture the “sole” representation of the corpse, but a body decomposed through the process of cremation. Portraits of The Visitors represent a real Memento mori iconography, without the (sole) possibility of symbolic death, but through the inevitability of the real.