Rain Bordo

Critical Review: “Deviation of Chaos” – The Lost Canvas of Nimonbum
By Rain Bordo (Mateo Balaban)
Standing before this vibrant, chaotic composition, one confronts not merely a painting, but a visual manifestation of profound psychological turbulence. The “Lost Canvas of Nimonbum” exists as both artistic statement and tragic testament—a mirror reflecting the fractured consciousness of a deeply wounded spirit.
The narrative accompanying this work reveals a boy whose brilliance was met with cruelty, whose imagination offered escape from unbearable reality. His story is one we recognize in fragments throughout history: the misunderstood visionary, the rejected dreamer, the vulnerable mind grappling with darkness. Rain Bordo has rendered this internal anguish in explosive color—brilliant blues and pinks colliding against blacks and raw marks, as though the canvas itself bears witness to a mind reaching desperately outward.
What strikes most profoundly is how the work captures the paradox of desperation masquerading as hope. The boy’s elaborate technological fantasies—his plans for escape via laser propulsion, his dream of Andromeda where beings nurture rather than harm—represent the elaborate architectures we construct when reality becomes unbearable. These are not delusions of grandeur, but rather tender scaffolding holding up a collapsing world. Bordo understands this distinction with devastating clarity.
The painting’s composition mirrors this tension: organized marks and geometric forms fight against organic chaos, much as the boy’s rational mind battles his emotional devastation. The work refuses sentimentality, offering instead unflinching honesty about suffering.
The Architecture of Escape
The boy’s imaginative system is both tragically beautiful and heartbreakingly logical. He does not simply wish to flee—he constructs entire theoretical frameworks for departure, down to the precise chemistry of combustible compounds and the physics of laser refraction. This is the mind of someone whose intellect has become his prison and his only key. He calculates escape routes because calculation represents control in a world that has offered him none. Each technological specification, each engineering puzzle, becomes a meditation on autonomy in the face of powerlessness.
Bordo captures this intellectualization of pain through the painting’s deliberate marks and structured elements. The black lines that traverse the canvas function like blueprints, like the boy’s handwritten notes in his hidden chest. They suggest intention, design, methodology—the desperate human need to impose order upon chaos, even when that order leads toward darkness.
Misunderstanding as Cruelty
The narrative emphasizes repeatedly that the boy was misunderstood. This simple phrase contains multitudes. Misunderstanding is not neutral; it is a form of violence. When a sensitive, creative mind is systematically dismissed, when kindness is mistaken for weakness, when unique ways of seeing the world are pathologized rather than nurtured—misunderstanding becomes abuse. The father’s mental cruelty forms the foundation upon which all subsequent suffering is built.
Bordo presents this with quiet, unflinching accuracy. There is no melodrama here, no performative darkness. Instead, there is the honest portrait of someone whose capacity for wonder has been weaponized against him, whose gifts have become burdens, whose very sensitivity—perhaps his greatest asset—becomes his deepest wound.
The Dream of Nimonbum
Among all the boy’s imaginative constructs, Planet Nimonbum stands as the most poignant. It is not Mars or Venus—places we might actually reach. It is imaginary, a projection of longing for a world fundamentally different from this one. More significantly, it is named after his artistic vision; it belongs to him alone. On Nimonbum, beings do not fight—they nurture. Water exists abundantly. One can sail freely with unfurled sails.
This is the boy’s articulation of what he lacks: safety, belonging, the simple grace of being cared for. That he must invent an entire planet to experience this speaks volumes about the poverty of human connection available to him on Earth. Bordo does not judge this fantasy; instead, the artist honors it as a valid response to genuine deprivation.
The painting’s lighter passages—the pale blues, the moments of luminosity—may represent these glimpses of hoped-for worlds, moments when the boy’s consciousness momentarily escapes into possibility before gravity inevitably pulls him back.
The Geometry of Grief
Formally, the work employs intersecting lines, geometric shapes, and explosive bursts of color to articulate emotional states that language struggles to capture. The red X marks scattered across the canvas suggest negation, crossing out, erasure. They are marks of refusal—refusal to continue, refusal to accept the world as it is. Yet simultaneously, they are marks of defiance, lines drawn against the void.
The splattered, almost Jackson Pollock-esque background suggests uncontrolled emotion breaking through rational structure. This tension between control and release defines the entire composition. It is the visual equivalent of a mind simultaneously planning escape and surrendering to despair.
Art as Testimony
What makes this work significant is its refusal to aestheticize suffering into something merely beautiful or decorative. This is not art designed to be comfortable. It is art designed to bear witness. Through this painting and accompanying narrative, Rain Bordo has created something like a monument—not to glorify the boy’s despair, but to acknowledge its reality, its validity, and the specific way that rejection, misunderstanding, and isolation can calcify into something irreversible.
The work asks us not to look away, but to look deeper. To recognize in the boy’s story elements of our own potential negligence, our own failures to truly see those around us. To understand that sensitivity is not weakness, that genius can flourish in the most broken vessels, and that sometimes the minds most capable of imagining beauty are also most susceptible to darkness.
Conclusion
“Deviation of Chaos” ultimately succeeds as a work of art because it succeeds as an act of remembrance. In creating this visual and narrative testimony, Bordo performs an essential function: he refuses to let suffering be forgotten or abstracted. The boy remains specific, particular, real—his pain is not universal and therefore dismissible, but deeply individual and therefore undeniable.
Standing before this canvas, we are confronted with our own capacity for indifference, our own tendency to misunderstand, our own failure to recognize desperation when it wears the mask of ambition. The painting does not offer redemption or resolution. Instead, it offers something perhaps more valuable: honest witnessing, compassionate understanding, and the artist’s clear-eyed insistence that some stories must be told, some voices must be heard, even—or perhaps especially—when they emerge from the deepest wells of human suffering.
This is necessary art for a world that has perfected the art of not seeing.

Priča:

DEVIJACIJA KAOSA


Bio jednom jedan tužni dječak.
Bio je to lijep dječak, imao je zalizanu kosu i krive zube. Bio je lijep. Lijepi dječak je bio neshvaćen. Lijepog dječaka je tata mentalno zlostavljao. Dječak se teško snalazio u društvu. Ljepše mu je bilo povući se u svoj svijet i tamo ostati. Dječak je imao razne ideje kako da pomogne društvu. Dječak je jednom pao i ozlijedio koljeno. Od tada nije više hodao. Mogao je micati rukama pa je pisao. Dječak je napisao knjigu „Sarkofag“, želeći ući u njega i zakopati se. Dječak je dobio ideju da pobjegne s planeta. Smislio je i kako. Veliki laseri koji pogone letjelicu, način je za odlazak. Jednom je gledao kako laser buši balon zrakom i tu mu je sinula ideja.
Letjelica se pomoću goriva digne na određenu visinu. Dvije tisuće kilometara. Letjelica je upogonjena propelerima koji je dignu u vis. Zatim sa Zemlje veliki laseri sa zelenim svjetlom ciljaju u jednu točku na letjelici i gađaju je u jednu točku. Ti laseri, poput onih koji služe kod laserskih operacija, izazivaju eksploziju koja podigne letjelicu na višu točku od 2 tisuće kilometara. Tu je dječak uvidio da bi moralo doći do lančane reakcije ‒ eksplozija. Dječak je usnuo da se ono što eksplodira sastoji od sumporne kiseline, nitratne kiseline, benzina i kisika pod tlakom. Kisik bi služio da može doći do eksplozije u svemiru jer je zaključio da kisik podupire vatru da ne bi došlo do implozije. Dječak je poludio.
Zatim je dječak napisao pjesmu „Grančica u blatu“ i sjetio se kako je nekada bio sretan.
Ah.
Vrlo je bitno shvatiti dječaka i želju za odlaskom.
Dječak je zaključio, dakako, da sumporna i nitratna kiselina, benzin i kisik pod tlakom, moraju biti pod kompresijom tako da 10 tisuća litara tekućine stane u jednu kap kako bi ciklus eksplozija, koji je lančani, mogao pogoniti letjelicu daleko izvan Sunčeva sustava. Dječak je želio posjetiti galaksiju Andromeda. Tamo je čuo da se bića ne tuku, nego njeguju.
Bio jednom jedan tužni dječak.
Budući da su laseri na Zemlji, a svjetlo je jedino što putuje brzo, morao je shvatiti kako da se laser ne kreće samo pravocrtno. Naravno, to je bilo bitno zbog toga što neće letjelica uvijek ići pravocrtno, nego će ići ili lijevo ili desno ili će neki komet prekinuti laserima put; tako da je bio na 100 muka. Dugo je mislio i zaključio da mora pretvoriti ogledalo u česticu svjetla.
Kako se to radi, zapisao je na jedan papir i zaključao ga u kovčeg u jednoj pećini na vrhu planine. Smatrao je da svijet nije spreman za taj pothvat i kada dođe vrijeme, reći će gdje se kovčeg nalazi.
Bio jednom jedan tužni dječak.
Kada bismo pretvorili ogledalo u česticu svjetla, tada bismo mogli odrediti parametre da se snop svjetla, koji je recimo valjkastog oblika, može na jednoj točki na obodu ponašati kao ogledalo, tako da skrene put tog svjetla i upogoni letjelicu da se kreće ili u lijevu ili u desnu stranu.
Dječak se dosjetio kako naseliti ledeni planet. Katapultirao bi velike grijalice da ga odlede i poslao konverter planetarnih plinova u kisik i kroz par godina bi otišao na taj „novi vodeni svijet“ i plovio.
Raširio bi jedra.
Planet na kojem bi mu bilo dobro, nazvao bi Nimonbum.
Dječak se sjetio jedne djevojčice koja mu se svidjela.
Bio jednom jedan tužni dječak.
Napisao je pjesmu „Sloboda“.
Bio jednom jedan tužni dječak.
Dječak je stavio metak u cijev.
Bio jednom jedan tužni dječak.