Oliver Mišura: Six Portraits of Chandeliers and their Weird Games
St. Jerolim Art Gallery
August 01st – 13th, 2025
Opening: August 01st 2025, at 8:30pm
In Oliver Mišura’s series of paintings, which represent six portraits of chandeliers, the visual representation of each object transcends its rudimentary functionality and alludes to the multi-layered ontology of an object within a space. A chandelier, as a symbol of luxury, power, and seduction, is here not just an object that emits light but becomes an entity that calls on philosophical contemplation about perception and the reality of things themselves. In further visual exploration, this is represented by the ambivalent presence of the chandeliers: they are displaced from spaces where we would expect to find them and deprived of their primary function of providing light and decorating opulent salons. Mišura implements a restrained, almost monochromatic palette for painting backgrounds, contrasting the rich colours and textures of the chandeliers. As such, it emphasises their materiality, allowing their complex forms and reflective surfaces to emerge from the dark or muted background with an almost eerie presence. The play of light and shadow is carefully constructed, with special emphasis on illusionistic qualities of glass, crystal, and metal, creating tension between the presented opulence and the emptiness of the surroundings. This contract emphasises the isolation of the chandelier as an object, inviting the observer to contemplate its aesthetic and symbolic value in the absence of context or function.
Alongside the paintings a selection of ready-made objects is placed: metal springs, white gloves, red peppers, crystal glasses, insect figurines and a carpet, their weird games, which further expand the narrative of the work, creating a dialogue between the everyday, the utilitarian and the symbolic. Their presence disrupts the expected order and creates the impression that the objects do not belong to the world in which they are arranged. This approach can be linked to Graham Harman’s theory of speculative realism, which argues that objects possess their own reality independent of how we experience or use them. In this light, these everyday objects, displaced from their familiar context, become weird entities that create their own relationships with the portraits of chandeliers and with each other.
Friedrich Kittler theorises that a lightbulb is not just a source of light but a medium that shapes our perception and everyday life, making us dependent on technologically mediated experience of reality- “In other words, technical media are models of the so-called human precisely because they were developed strategically to override our senses.” (Kittler, Optical Media). Mišura’s chandeliers, although deprived of their function of illumination, remind one of that dependency, becoming symbols of technology that no longer serve humans but define them. Moreover, by presenting these technological objects as visually dominant and deprived of their functionality, Mišura encourages deliberation on our relationship to functionality: a chandelier, once a symbol of progress and prestige, now remains a hollow artefact – aesthetic but without function. That is how these works criticise our tendency to aestheticise technology and not face the systems of addiction and control that new technologies embody and continue to manifest today in different forms. These works invite deeper contemplation about the role of aesthetic objects and technology in day-to-day life, as well as the boundary between visual experience and ontological reality.
Jadra Ryle