THE MAN BEHIND THE PAINTING: STEVO BAJALICA AND THE WORLD BETWEEN SLEEP AND AWAKENING

Sometimes we wake up from a dream and know that we were dreaming, but we can’t say what it was about. All that remains is a strange feeling—an image, a face, a fragment of a place, an atmosphere. And perhaps that is precisely why some dreams never fade away completely. In his work, STEVO BAJALICA turns to this very space between dreaming and waking. To a place where things don’t yet function the way they do during the day. Where we don’t have to explain everything. Where a memory can turn into a feeling, and a feeling into an image.

And that is actually a very accurate key to understanding his paintings.

Bajalica does not view her paintings as literal depictions of dreams. It is not about painting a specific dream in a way that the viewer can understand. What’s far more important is capturing the atmosphere, the perspective, the feeling, the fragment, or the moment that remains from the dream—that which slowly fades away after waking up. And this is precisely where his work begins to intrigue the viewer, because each of us has our own experience with dreams. Everyone has woken up some morning knowing they’d had a dream, only to find that within a few minutes, they could no longer recall the plot. Only something remained. A feeling.

Bajalica describes this space as a place where he can paint. In his own words, his paintings are not the commands of a dream. They are traces of something that happened at the moment we were dreaming. Perhaps that is why they may seem familiar—not because we have seen a specific scene before, But because they evoke a feeling within us that we recognize. MAYBE THAT IS PRECISELY WHY WE DON’T JUST LOOK AT SOME PAINTINGS WITH OUR EYES. We observe them and, at the same time, search for something within them.

One of the motifs associated with Bajalic’s work is *Dreamcatcher* / *Hvatač snova*. The title itself raises the question:

Behind every work of art is a person—with their own experiences, memories, questions, and way of looking at the world. And that’s exactly why we created the series “The Person Behind the Painting.” We don’t want to just look at the finished work. We also want to get to know the people behind them. Because sometimes, a single detail from an artist’s life can help us see their painting through a completely different lens.

YOU'LL ALSO HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPERIENCE STEVE BAJALICA'S WORK IN PERSON.