NMMU: Could you tell us about the works you’re presenting in your solo exhibition Büyük Menderes, opening on June 4 at the Josip Račić Gallery?
Mateo Perasović: For this occasion, Branko Franceschi, director of the NMMU and curator of the exhibition, and I selected 13 recent works created between 2023 and 2025. These pieces were developed gradually as part of a project provisionally titled Büyük Menderes. They are executed in a mixed-media technique that involves layering different planes of the image — vertically stacked stratums (meta, para, or hypo, depending on how you look at it), with deliberate spacing: paint, glass, paint again, a void of color, mirror, forex or kapa board…
The process may sound complex, but the technique itself is quite simple — it’s reminiscent of display window arrangement, with a focus on creating a 3D visual experience. It’s as though the image is trying to present itself in three dimensions, transforming into an object in space.
Whether I succeeded in that goal — as the maker in the studio — will ultimately be judged by the exhibition’s visitors.
The works draw on two main sources: one is the Greek ornamental relief, and the other is a circular wreath motif, perforated in a plaster stele and a painting I exhibited in 2000 at Salon Galić in Split, as part of the exhibition Balance of Noise, which featured several other works as well.
I believe that show marked a pivotal moment from which my artistic potential began evolving simultaneously in two directions — toward the past and the future. I tried to clarify this view in my 2017 monograph Fear of Death, published by the Academy of Arts, University of Split. It’s available on the Academy and University’s online repository.

NMMU: What did your parents do? Was there any artistic or art-loving background in your family?
Mateo Perasović: I believe I’ve addressed childhood, parents, adolescence, friends, maturing, and dying quite clearly in the monograph.
Scientifically speaking — to comprehend the smallest (fundamental) cosmological particle(?), CERN would need to be the size of the universe. It's similar with the depiction of a life. Life itself is a single narrative that demands an equally vast space-time quantum to be described.

NMMU: Was drawing your earliest form of communication with the world? What fascinated you most as a child?
Mateo Perasović: My first conscious artwork was a painted terracotta piece — a female nude in the style of the Venus of Willendorf — created in sixth or seventh grade.
My first publicly shown works (1974, in Split) featured a bold black + symbol, a bold - symbol, and a cluster of green circles or cells.
In just a few years, I made a rapid journey from material to spirit.

NMMU: What was Split like during your childhood?
Mateo Perasović: Childhood meant mothers and fathers, children and friends scattered across the city’s outer neighborhoods, making their way to the center — to the past. That sense of transition later manifested in my works from the 1990s and beyond, across various media: drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, video, object, installation, multimedia...

NMMU: This year marks an important milestone — five decades of exhibiting. How has your artistic path evolved, and have you changed over time? Do you have any enduring inspirations or recurring themes?
Mateo Perasović: It’s both interesting and curious that my first solo exhibition took place 50 years ago at the Bishop’s Palace in Split — a spiritually charged venue that, at the time, was shared by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, and the university library.
I’m not sure whether the University had already been officially established. In any case, I was still a student at a technical high school then, without a diploma, which I completed only after being admitted as a gifted young artist to the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo in 1975.
My eternal inspiration has been philosophical inquiry — first the existential/existentialist question: “Who am I, and why am I who I am?”, and then the larger ontological/ontological question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

NMMU: Throughout your career, you also worked in education. What, for you, was the essence of teaching? What was important for you to pass on to your students?
Mateo Perasović: To be honest, and perhaps unfortunately, there’s no real “magic” in education. It comes down to duty, responsibility, and hope — that the effort you invest will produce some positive outcome. I had an extraordinary rapport with children, young people, and others I taught or mentored over the years — or at least that’s my impression.

NMMU: How do you like to spend your time since retiring?
Mateo Perasović: Retirement means a fixed monthly payment to your bank account — everything else remains more or less the same as before.

NMMU: What works did you present at your solo exhibition in New Jersey in the early 1990s?
Mateo Perasović: New Jersey now feels as distant as the Homeland War. The works shown there came from a period when I was laboriously mastering a technique of sprayed PVC on canvas, trying to depict geometric forms as cosmic artifacts. I think the paintings were quite visually striking. Reproductions can be seen in my monograph, as they also served as the basis for the essayistic reflection I presented as a kind of confession.

NMMU: Is there a place you’d still like to visit?
Mateo Perasović: The last place I truly wanted to see was Göbekli Tepe in eastern Türkiye — a kind of “cosmic gas station” — an archaeological site dating back about 11,500 years, perched at the top of Mesopotamia, near the Syrian border. I drove up and down that route for over 1000 kilometers.
The rest is history — up to this very day.

Inteviewed by Lana Šetka © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photos: (1) Self-portrait in the studio, 2009 / Courtesy of Mateo Perasović
(2) Mateo Perasović, Fear of Death: Research and Development of an Artefact / University of Split Textbook / Publisher: Academy of Arts / University of Split, 2017 / Photo: from the NMMU archive
(3) Arabica in the studio, 2025
(4) Meanders in the studio, 2025 / Photo: Mateo Perasović / Courtesy of the artist