This painting shows the renovated public pool in Maribor as it stands today, but I painted it steeped in the melancholy memory of the old one that no longer exists. The current structure—clean tiles, new rails, polished edges—wears the face of the present, yet every grout line, every shift in colour, every weld carries the ghost of the unrenovated basin I knew as a child: that raw, enclosed space where late-afternoon light turned the water copper and the deep end felt both safe and infinite.
Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park grids gave me the formal language to hold light and edge in lucid suspension, but the real impulse was refusal: refusal to accept the banal replacement of a private childhood place with something merely efficient and public. I insist, through paint, that some losses are quiet, incremental, and piercing precisely because they are so ordinary. This is the new pool painted as if the old one were still inside it, grieving beneath the surface.
There is no splash here, no Hockneyesque exuberance of California hedonism; the pool is not a stage for liberation but a receptacle of private history, drained of its original function.
