During the time of socialism, in the seventies, questions of power and lack of power were important. This lack of power is a constant pain. My first work on the topic was the Game of Pain, a die on which the word pain was written on all the faces. However you throw it, the result is always the same. This is this powerlessness, and opposition to the idea that art is a game. Then I did a series of works with mattresses. In the red and black mattress, I handled colours like symbols of ideology and convention. In the nineties, more precisely for an exhibition at the Sydney Biennial in 1992, I did a work with white mattresses that are part of the cycle of white works with which I wanted to explore the symbolic dimension of white. I wondered what the colour of pain was. I came to the conclusion that for me it was white. There is no real rational explanation for this, it is more my personal viewpoint, some idea of mine about colours. I should say that the mattresses that I used for these works were always old, used up, with traces on the surface. Even when I painted them, visible traces remained, part of their history, some memory broke through. Sometime before the end of the nineties I concluded that I had to finish this mattress cycle. It was an excellent opportunity when I was invited to an exhibition in Slavonski Brod. I simply wrote the word PAIN on some old mattresses and buried them in a grave. I buried them to be rid of pain. However, graves are always a place that symbolically remembers pain, and then I realised that it was actually a closed circle, a constant repetition, that pain can’t be avoided. That’s probably why I went on with this topic, and now I have made the Dictionary of Pain.
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