Katarina Dragutinović Roccella “Piksel u tradiciji ili tradicija u pikselu”

Katarina Dragutinović Roccella, a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, within her doctoral artistic project Piksel u tradiciji ili tradicija u pikselu (Pixel in Tradition or Tradition in Pixel), uses the square as the fundamental building block of her compositions and multimedia installations.

The portrait, a timeless theme in visual arts, serves here only as a leitmotif and recognizable starting point, allowing the interplay of compositional elements to generate new solutions. These solutions can remain within the original theme or diverge from it. The materials used in the compositions are diverse—ranging from textile, canvas, to alumina—but what unifies the works is precisely the structural unit—the square—and the painterly concept of creation, even when painting occurs with non-painterly materials or techniques (textiles).

Although the pixel as a unit is analogized with the square, there is no pixelation of the subject on the portraits, as this was never the intention. The viewer does not perceive a digital aesthetic, especially since the process is highly manual. The stitched textiles, as a clear mark of the past, evoke the skilled hands of past generations and long-standing traditions of handmade work, reinforcing the sense of manual labor and subversively distancing the work from contemporary content, challenging visual expectations.

The poetic framework of the project explores relational instances framed and connected by the concepts of traditional and modern, seeking to answer the question: how much time or how many generations does it take for a contemporary practice to become tradition? The binary expression of “modern,” while rhetorically contrasting with “traditional” in visual reality, represents only one set of traditions in relation to another. Tradition, as a model of the past, is inseparable from its interpretation in the present and manifests in processes of transformation, appropriation, and reinterpretation of the past as a resource for shaping the present.

The works in this project are unified both thematically and by a “mosaic” methodology, constructing compositions from individual elements to a whole, as well as in a reversible process when it comes to sketches and audience interaction. Here, the whole is deconstructed to create an abstract visual puzzle, open to further artistic manipulation and variability.