The Guest House
2019
photography, 70 × 45 cm
In shots of hospital wards, hallways and waiting rooms that make up the photography series The Guest House by Matko Meštrović, there are no people, only faint indications of their recent presence. At first glance, the photographs might seem documentary, with a deadpan aesthetic. With careful observation, however, we notice subtle manipulations made by the artist by way of collage, creating purposefully not only the feeling of emptiness and human absence, but compositional and coloristic play on the surface of the picture plane as well. Considering the uncomfortable and barren atmosphere that emanates from these works, the artist’s escape to aesthetic experiment can be interpreted as a fictionalization of reality, or a (sub)conscious act of constructing a subjective narrative, inserted into an otherwise objective photographic frame.
Nikola Zmijarević

Photograms
2022
photography, 70 × 45 cm
With photographs made in the photogram technique, which was popularized by Man Ray at the beginning of the 20th century, Matko Meštrović directly records the seemingly chaotic natural processes of water that tend to self-organize and order. Photograms are photographic prints that are created without a camera, by direct contact between the object and the photosensitive substrate, which is then exposed to light. Therefore, they represent the culmination of photographic objectivity, since the results of such a process are actually “scans of nature”. The great aesthetic power of these works is thus secondary and derives from quasi-scientific procedures of observing reality.
Nikola Zmijarević