The year 2007 marks the point at which Milan Stamenovic’s painting practice undergoes a decisive internal shift. Still life, traditionally associated with order, balance, and symbolic legibility, is reconfigured as a site of inquiry rather than depiction. Objects cease to function as motifs and are instead treated as cognitive structures—material stand-ins for memory, repression, and interior tension.

This series introduces a pivotal methodological gesture: the incorporation of physical X-ray imagery into the painted surface. These are not metaphorical references, but actual diagnostic materials embedded through collage. Their presence fractures the visual logic of painting and establishes a new epistemic condition—one in which seeing is no longer optical but investigative. The surface is penetrated, not observed. Representation gives way to examination.

Through this intervention, the still life becomes anatomised. Objects are no longer defined by contour or use, but by what lies beneath them. The X-ray functions as both material and method: a mechanism for rendering the interior visible while simultaneously destabilising the authority of the visible. Painting, in this context, does not reveal truth—it exposes structure.

Collage enters the practice here not as a formal strategy, but as a form of memory residue. Fragments—paper, diagnostic imagery, written traces—are embedded into the work as mementos rather than symbols. They behave as remnants of lived experience, interrupting the painted field and preventing visual closure. The compositions resist harmony, favouring suspension, imbalance, and unresolved tension.

These early works establish the core principles that will govern Stamenovic’s later painting practice:
the refusal of illustrative symbolism,
the use of objects as psychological carriers,
and the treatment of the pictorial surface as a site of pressure rather than resolution.

Importantly, this series is not provisional. It does not anticipate a departure from still life, nor does it function as an experimental prelude. Instead, it defines a permanent orientation. The psychodynamic still life introduced here becomes the structural foundation upon which subsequent bodies of work are built—expanded, refined, and rearticulated, but never abandoned.

In Origins of the Psychodynamic Still Life, painting asserts itself as a diagnostic act. Meaning is not narrated, but sustained under tension. The works do not invite interpretation; they demand orientation. What emerges is not a visual language, but a method—one that positions painting as a tool for examining how consciousness inhabits material form.