Painting in the Age of Parallel Truths

In an era where reality arrives in overwhelming fragments—flashes of doomscrolls, baby photos, forest fires, receipts—Marin Majić builds quiet, dense worlds to house it all. His new solo show Dawning, which opened at the newly minted Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles, doesn’t merely reflect this fragmented existence; it refracts it, like sunlight caught in water.

Majić’s work is a flickering séance of memory and modernity, a place where the ghost of a party coexists with the pilot in his cockpit and the lone wolf howling behind glass. He doesn’t illustrate the world. He renders its afterimage—the retinal ghost left behind after you’ve looked too long at something you’re not sure you were meant to see.

A Method of Layered Duality

Each of the 16 works in Dawning emerges from a sculptural process that rivals geological time. Majić begins with collages: a junk drawer of 70s ads, Japanese firework manuals, lost corners of the internet. Then, on coarse burlap, he sketches with colored pencils—vibrant, raw, too exposed. To bury this intensity, he smothers the surface with a milky veil made from marble dust and oil, erasing to reveal, dimming to highlight.

The results hover between opacity and revelation. Like a radio slightly off-tune, these works crackle with unspoken narratives. They’re not about balance—they’re about the flickering in-between.

Where All Times Happen at Once

The exhibition begins and ends with a whispered contradiction: two cave paintings—one “dawn,” one “night”—frame the gallery’s threshold. They pose a question without punctuation: is this one evening, or two lives? In between, paintings glimmer with allusions. An astronaut, a man by a plane window, a party that might be in the 40s or next week. Time loops and splits.

Majić’s compositions feel like those nights you remember differently depending on who’s telling the story. One piece, You looking for you, me looking for me, captures this precisely: a diptych where a couple by a plane window laughs in one canvas, while in the next, the man sits alone, mouth closed, going in the opposite direction. A rupture? A rewind? A reverb?

The Uncanny as an Invitation

Freud’s “uncanny” slithers into Majić’s works not through horror, but through recognition gone strange. A boy in traditional garb stares from a forest that looks a bit too still. A man in uniform poses in summer heat, surrounded by blooming shrubs so exaggerated they almost leer.

These compositions woo you in with familiarity, then undo you with scale and skew. A hand too large, a face too smooth, shadows too sentient. The effect is not disorientation, but seduction. Majić wants you to lean in—only to find the intimacy slippery, like a dream you can almost retell.

Art at the Speed of Light

“Speed dictates time,” Majić reminds us, echoing the physics behind everything everywhere all at once. At the speed of light, time halts. Majić doesn’t claim to stop it, but he paints like he’s seen it stutter. The glowing orb in I will not follow could be a sun or a moon. The rushing water might be carpet, or grief.

These paintings hum with ambiguity—not in a lazy, postmodern shrug, but as a deliberate opening. Ambivalence becomes a key, a method for slipping past surface into symbol. Majić’s aesthetic—lush, dark, tender—offers a form of time travel, not to the past, but to a collapsed present where everything is happening now. A place where science hasn’t taken us, but where art already lives.

From the Personal to the Cosmic (and Back)

Majić’s power lies in how deeply personal these riddles are. He paints in the aftermath of a birth, while the world burns and scrolls. The same hand that mixes marble dust also cradles a newborn. The dissonance is not resolved. It’s not supposed to be.

Instead, Dawning sits with the fact that our lives, however ordinary, however intimate, unfold against the tectonic grind of history. The miracle is not that we endure, but that we continue to notice beauty at all—inside a shadow, a veil, a half-remembered dance floor.

Majić doesn’t paint answers. He paints portals. Some shimmer with sentimentality. Others glower with ennui. All demand that you stop mid-scroll, mid-chaos, and simply look.

His work, like memory itself, isn’t about clarity. It’s about resonance. The echo that lingers after reality has already moved on.