In a silent 42-minute video, Toronto painter Viktor Mitic demonstrates his strange artistic process.
In one scene, we see his portrait of Jesus Christ, a minimalist work done in vivid acrylics. A halo of gold leaf crests over Jesus's head and his gaze is serene, seemingly fixed upon something in the far-off distance.
Or perhaps he's looking toward the assault rifle that suddenly moves into the frame. The gun pauses briefly over Jesus's left temple, then rapidly blasts a constellation of bullet holes around his head.
Mitic is no agnostic – the 40-year-old Serbian-born artist is Orthodox Christian. Nor is he a gun enthusiast, he insists. He just likes to create art, using the occasional AK-47 or semi-automatic pistol.
“It is a bit strange,” Mitic admits. “Before I was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm going to shoot the picture of Jesus.' But then I realized I'm not shooting at the picture of Jesus, I'm creating a picture of Jesus with this medium.”
Mitic was so pleased with the results that he's since taken up arms against all of his artworks – which has spurred both outrage from some audiences and interest from galleries.
It's the kind of attention-getting strategy that has worked before. From Andreas Serrano's Piss Christ (a photo of a crucifix in urine) to Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary portrait using elephant dung, disrespect for iconic imagery can be good for sales.
Jesus continues to be one of Mitic's targets. The painter also recently completed a triptych of portraits that will be exhibited at Toronto's AWOL gallery next month. And he's finishing a portrait series of well-known art dealers such as Larry Gagosian, Nicholas Metivier and Alan Loch – a scheme likely to capture even more attention from movers and shakers in the art world.
In fact, it was an art dealer who first inspired Mitic's interest in the artistic potential of guns, after a rather unpleasant encounter last June.
The dealer dropped by Mitic's studio to appraise some paintings but spent the entire visit on his cellphone, shushing the artist while trying to sell a Michelangelo Pistoletto painting to a New York client. The dealer left, but not without first glancing over Mitic's Jesus Christ portrait and declaring it “not penetrating enough.”
A somewhat impish man with a predilection for puns, Mitic immediately had an idea: He called his friend, fellow artist Kiat Lim Chew, and three hours later they were in a 24-hour shooting range in Buffalo, unleashing a salvo of bullets onto the work. Mitic has since named the painting, appropriately, Hole Jesus . Its price is $8,050.
“I was thinking, ‘Am I going to be punished by God later on in life?'” he recalls. “But then you just go into a different zone and it became work, it became painting.”
To date, Mitic has punched about 100,000 gunpowder-scorched holes through more than 50 of his paintings. He still crosses the border to create his “penetrating art” because Ontario shooting ranges won't let him use pictures of people as targets, something they fear can be construed as practising for an execution or assassination.
So far, he's pointed his gun at images of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Benazir Bhutto, John F. Kennedy and the Virgin Mary, to name a few. He's shot a painting of John Lennon using the same model of gun that killed the singer, a Charter Arms .38-calibre pistol. He's also doused a painting of Mao Zedong in pig's blood, blasting it full of holes and naming it Mao Tze Bang .
And then there's his painting of the Last Supper, which Mitic spent seven hours spraying with about 3,000 rifle bullets. This one he dubbed The Blast Supper .
