The works of Nebojša Despotovic are inexorably detached from a recognizable context and, even if they all appear to us as extraneous to our life, many speak of experiences that we recognize, resulting as reflected in a clouded but familiar mirror. The characters / actors who populate them play parts in which the artist himself identifies himself, to the point of assigning names or nicknames to the figures while he paints them. The fact that they look like characters in costume makes them seem even more real because they are transposed into a timeless world, without precise references to our experience and everything belongs to an infinite moment in the great comedy of life.

I have sometimes wondered if all these men and women and, above all, children, had sprung from the Polish Jewish world after or immediately before the German bombing of Warsaw, if they were the children of an oversized London, or of Bertolucci's anonymous extras of the twentieth century. The cinema that, with all Neorealist.

Each of his works, examined in depth, appears as an appropriation of the worlds and poetics of others. In some the erotic world of Scipio appears, the superimposed material of Picabia and all the derision of the bourgeois world of Bunüel of Le chien andalou or of the discreet fascination of the bourgeoisie, the expressionist distortion of Doctor Caligari by Robert Wiene but also that of Murnau appears , Lang and Pabst. The connections are therefore infinite - the game of dominoes or cadavre esquis, in which one tile accompanies another and generates a third and then a fourth and so on, like the psychological associations in which the psychoanalyst asks you to associate images to other images - thus the artist's work operates in his mind associations and formal, conceptual and aesthetic links that go “free rein”, in an automatic, metaphorical way, as in a mescaline writing of similar and consequent images.

He mentally immerses himself in the story painted on the canvas, and then estranges himself from it and, taking a step back, to summarize the role of the creator and therefore director of the scene. The theater, the painting, the person, the characters, the director and the actors, the roles and the life, whether true or false, live in a mental and real ballet that is expressed beyond the canvas / curtain / backdrop, beyond the studio of the artist, but also everything inside his mind.

Above all the interiors, the living rooms of the houses depicted, are theatrical scenes where you could play Ibsen (Doll's House), James (Portrait of a Lady) but also Beckett (Waiting for Godot) and Jarry (Ubu Roi). These bourgeois interiors in which there is always a lamp, a coffee table, redundant armchairs, carpets and chandeliers, are the stereotype of the bourgeois house, of the anonymous and colorless place, designed to leave more space for family tragedies that do not need refined interiors and of selected and personal objects, of important paintings and of recognized authors. The place assumes the status of "non-place", of a furnished desert, it could be sand dunes of a desert or mountain rocks. These non-places are the scenography for the characters depicted who could, in a phantasmatic way, transmigrate from one work to another.