PETALING JAYA, March 18 ― Lithuanian-born artist Ernest Zacharevic found it difficult to cope with the Covid-19 lockdowns, especially after losing his grandparents.

He was also unable to attend their funeral due to travel restrictions.

Zacharevic, who is based in Penang, is famed for his children’s murals at Penang’s Armenian Street, said that their deaths was one of the hardest things he had to go through during the earlier stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This was in addition to not being able to see his family for the past three years.

Consequently, to get through the tough times he turned to art and one of the results is his latest exhibition ‘Everything Will Be Ok’ in RexKL.

It features children in a 16x4 metres portrait in Mondrian boxes as a reminder for him and everyone that grief and suffering as a result of the pandemic is only temporary.

The full artwork of children in different Mondrian boxes was a project that Zacharevic had been working on since 2015. — Picture by Shafwan Zaidon

"Although this phrase doesn’t seem to make an impact right now, it's a message that I try to embrace to reassure myself that things will be better one day.

"For the first time in my life, my problems were everyone else’s problems ― whether it’s climate change or the mental pressures of having had to cope with self-isolation during the last two years.

"Reading the news seems to evoke a sense of anxiety of the alarming situation, and that’s why I created this portrait with that theme. To tell everyone to be positive and to look for a better outlook against these dark times.

"Although I didn’t struggle as an artist as I had the liberty to work on my other art projects, I had a rough time coping with the Covid-19 pandemic just like anyone else as I was anxious and emotionally tired,” he said to Malay Mail.

Children separated by boxes symbolising how mass media divides us

Children, which are his main subjects in murals, are also a main feature in his latest RexKL exhibition.

"We usually see murals or paintings of famous people but we hardly see that of children - and I always wonder why.

"Not all of us will end up as politicians, rockstars, but we were all children once and I wanted all who would see the piece to be able to relate to that.

"And this artwork is something that I’ve been working on since 2015 ― it was only a fragment of the big portrait back and I’ve always had bigger ambitions to expand it.”

The children, in different poses, are placed on different Mondrian boxes ― inspired by Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian, who came up with abstract paintings made up of squares and rectangles.

Famous for his children's mural, the artist hopes that the audience would be able to form their own interpretation of what they think of the painting.— Picture via Shafwan Zaidon

Squares and rectangles, according to the artist, are like mass media that are designed to put us at places where people choose to see what they wish to see and hear what they want to hear.

Part of the description of the exhibition writes: "Ignorance can be a useful tool to maintain sanity in a world that confines you into a rigid shape.

"The inflexible state of society is often due to the echo chambers created through mass media.

"Those with similar shapes of thinking tend to stay within a space that reinforces their own perspectives.”

Adding to this, Zacharevic said that like children in different boxes, one tends to live in self-isolation and be separated from each other due to the differences that we have.

"At times, we only want to interact with people who agree with us and that makes us feel more isolated due to our different opinions,” he said.

Zacharevic’s exhibition will be up till March 22 and anyone interested can pay a visit to RexKL.