Garaža Kamba

Stepping out of two-dimensional planes, beyond the confines of the frame, Monica Milas creates black plastic bodies of metaphysical significance by tearing, creasing, stretching, and merging. Soft foils soaked in black ink allow the creation of free forms made due to instant inspiration that establishes direct communication with the surrounding space. Each component in the combination of the colour red, green, and blue through the RGB model can vary from a maximum value, to an initial zero — 0, 0, 0, decimal, or 000000 hexadecimal — that results in black. The colour black is a consequence of the absence or complete absorption of light in the visible spectrum, which is paradoxically transmitted and redirected on the smooth surfaces of plastic stretchable forms, making the apparent blackness of the newly created ambience transparent and reflective, bringing it into a sort of negation on a physical and figurative level. The meaning of the title of the exhibition At Zero also refers to the point zero of existence, to the very beginning or to the term of the ancient philosopher Anaximander – apeiron – which denotes the boundless, indefinite and infinite. The unformed primordial substance is materialized by an translucent, elastic and resistant black plastic mass, as a kind of ontological research experiment with the medium in its temporary time-space determinant. The indefiniteness of the apeiron represented to the Pythagoreans its almost negative property, just as in the traditional philosophical sense the aesthetics of the ugly was represented by that which has no form of its own, which deviates from cosmic harmony. Monica Milas’ asymmetrical, amorphous, deformed black foils oppose idealized beauty by imitating an imaginary pracosmic cobweb, forming a waste that becomes a spatial canvas, a material of existential expression that cosmologically places the distortion of ideals and infinity into the embodiment of a new spiritual harmony.

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