In the quiet fire of a red canvas and the restless pulse of orange, Rain Bordo (Mateo Balaban) asks the question that refuses easy answers:
“Who am I when I am not?”
“Tko sam ja kada ja nisam?”
Two paintings. One ontological wound.
The first, stark white letters trembling against blood-red, strips the self bare. The second, raw black brushstrokes scarring a vibrating orange field, refuses to let the question rest. Together they form a diptych of existential rupture — not a statement, but a mirror held up to the void we carry inside our most confident performances.
Rain Bordo does not paint answers. He paints the fracture. In these works, identity is exposed as costume: biography, roles, likes, masks, the heavy metal roar of the ego that thinks it knows itself. What remains when the performance ends? When the “I” dissolves into silence? Heidegger’s thrownness, Sartre’s nothingness, the Buddhist insight into impermanence — all whisper here through color and word. Yet Bordo goes further. He suggests that only in this dissolution does true empathy begin. If my “I” is not fixed, then neither is yours. We meet, finally, in the shared fragility.
These are not decorative objects. They are philosophical koans painted with the raw aggression of a poet who also lives in the language of heavy metal and humanism. Color speaks where words fail. Texture screams where certainty pretends to be silent.
Stand before them long enough and the question turns back on you:
Who are you when you are not?
Maybe we are finally free.
Or maybe we are nothing.
And maybe — just maybe — that is exactly where empathy is born.
Mateo Balaban aka Rain Bordo
Who am I when I am not (diptych / English & Croatian versions)
http://www.rainbordo.com
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Rain Bordo 