Today we’d like to introduce you to Nemanja Stevanovic.
Hi Nemanja, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My journey began with an instinct, a quiet insistence, that human creativity would soon face one of its greatest tests. I am a painter at heart, though my work now moves fluidly between canvas and digital space, forming a kind of conceptual ecosystem where each medium reflects and refracts the other. When I started in 2017, I sensed the rising wave of artificial intelligence and understood that we were approaching an era in which technology would not merely mirror reality but fabricate a heightened, seductive perfection of it.
In a world where AI doesn’t just imitate reality but generates a “perfected,” hyperreal version of it, and as Jean Baudrillard would say, a simulacrum: a copy without an original, I felt compelled to reaffirm the imperfect, fragile pulse of human creation. My answer took the form of a painting, a simple pause symbol. It was quiet, almost minimal, but it held a kind of resistance. That image became my daily ritual. I posted the same work every day, turning repetition into a living concept, a meditation on stillness amid technological acceleration.
With time, the project expanded. I began producing digital works that revolved around the painting like satellites, each one echoing, distorting, or elevating its meaning. And when the earliest language models appeared, far before the mainstream explosion, I folded them into my process as well. Their presence introduced a paradox: while these tools open new creative terrains, they also threaten to erode the slow, intimate cultivation of personal skill.
It reminds me of what Paul Klee once wrote: “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.” Today, AI can reproduce endlessly, but only the human hand can reveal.
That tension is the essence of the pause. It is not a retreat, but a deliberate breath. A reminder that in an age of infinite simulation, choosing to slow down and create from within becomes its own form of rebellion.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The road has rarely been smooth, but I’ve come to believe that friction is an essential part of any genuine creative path. Without resistance, nothing leaves an imprint. The challenges I faced were less about external obstacles and more about the interior landscapes one must cross as an artist. There is always a quiet struggle between what you feel compelled to express and what the world is prepared to understand.
Working at the intersection of traditional painting and digital, conceptual practice often meant inhabiting a space without clear reference points. I found myself navigating questions rather than answers. What does authenticity mean in an age of replication? What does it mean to create slowly in a culture obsessed with acceleration? These weren’t just intellectual dilemmas but lived ones. Every step forward required a kind of philosophical negotiation with the technologies reshaping our sense of reality.
Perhaps the most profound struggle was confronting the very subject of my work, the tension between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It’s unsettling to create art about a force that is simultaneously expanding and eroding the boundaries of creativity itself. At times it felt like standing on a shoreline where the sand is perpetually shifting beneath your feet.
Yet those moments of uncertainty became formative. They taught me that difficulty isn’t a deviation from the path; it is the path. Art, after all, does not emerge from comfort but from questioning. The pauses, the hesitations, the doubts, they were not interruptions to my journey but the very places where my work deepened.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
What sets me apart is this commitment to embracing both tradition and experimentation, to navigating the space between the tangible and the conceptual, and to maintaining a deeply personal, human voice in a time when technology can imitate almost anything. My work is, in many ways, a meditation on presence, intention, and the irreplaceable value of human creativity.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
One of my favorite childhood memories is surprisingly not a gentle or idyllic one, but a moment of pure collision between fear, fate, and instinct. I was five years old when we bought a new bicycle. My grandmother took me out into the flat fields to try it for the first time. I climbed onto the bike, full of excitement, and without fully understanding the terrain I began pedaling straight toward a steep downhill road. Very quickly I gained speed, moving faster than my young mind could comprehend. When I turned around, I saw my grandmother running after me in her socks, and that image has stayed engraved in my memory ever since.
Between me and the cliff that overlooked the main road there was only a single utility pole. I hit it head on, inertia lifted me forward, and I crashed into it with my head, breaking my nose. But that pole saved my life. My grandmother reached me, lifted me to my feet without a word, and quietly led me back home.
Most people would not call such a moment a favorite memory, but I would. It was my first encounter with fear, with the precariousness of life, and with the thin line that separates danger from safety. Looking back, that experience taught me something essential. Even in chaos, there are forces, whether we name them fate, intuition, or sheer accident, that intervene in the decisive instant.
And perhaps that is why the memory remains so vivid. It was the moment I learned that vulnerability is not something to escape but something to understand. It showed me that awareness is born not only from beauty but from impact, and that sometimes the events that shake us the most are the ones that shape us the deepest.
Pricing:
- Pause Painting – $2m
Contact Info:
- Website: under construction
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pausepainting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pausepainting
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-stevanovic/
- Twitter: https://x.com/pausepainting
Image Credits
@pausepainting
