Davor Mezak is once again playing with another dimension of (non-, super-) humanity, delving into the theme of genetic engineering and "flawless" reproductive cloning, the creation of offspring through the mediation of science that copies nature, traditionally the methodology of - art itself. Mezak once again forsakes the characteristic combination of high-tech (video) and low-tech (painting) media for his work. This time, in the associatively named Clone Stamp graphic tool, he intervenes in photographs found on the Internet – beautiful anonymous models, top models, and celebrities like Ronaldo, a living legend and the world's best footballer, but also the infamous Milošević.
The women in the photographs are transformed into sci-fi beings with a third eye or two iris-less eyes, monsters without noses (a noseless face is a desirable trait in breeding Angora cats) or with Pinocchio-esque "lying" noses that turn a beautiful woman into a humorous character. Mezak calls this twisted menagerie of characters Clon-error, akin to Ripley's failed and discarded predecessors with implanted Alien genetic code. There are also hybrid characters (like mythical centaurs and sirens – powerful images of human dual nature, animal and "divine") created by grafting insects onto the body of a model, simultaneously desirable and repulsive; caterpillar-woman and grasshopper-woman (a combination of beings of different scales - dimensions) reminiscent of possible monstrous mistakes of scientists in the role of creator (does this change the image of God? Voltaire said "if God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated to him" ...). Doesn't "cloning" Naomi Campbell (her likeness multiplied into a decorative raster effect) lead to the devaluation of beauty, and the multiplication of the football ace into a senseless situation of assembling a team of only winners, all with identical playing strategy? The symbol of femininity and object of desire - the nipples on the model's breasts, Mezak "cloned" by implanting them in place of the woman's eyes, after which she literally has a "penetrating gaze". The woman with tentacles or proboscises literally becomes a femme fatale, a seductive predator.
S. Kalčić