Nikola Nikola: the legacy of artistic transformation

by Larry Gaudet

A while back I was wandering in the warehouse studio of the artist Nikola Nikola in a small town several hours north of Toronto. There I came upon a painting in acrylic, four-by-five feet, optically intense in its swirling depths and graceful skeins of color. At the centre of this work, titled A Long-Legged Grasshopper, there’s an apparition of a kind common in Nikola’s work, evocative of the human figure, but abstracted, a ghostly weave of elements, although you can make out two arms reaching forward and a head-like shape in profile and other clues that in aggregate say, this is a person. I assumed I was looking at someone metaphorically presented as a grasshopper. But who was the grasshopper? And what was it doing?

That’s when Nikola, dangling an unreadable grin, gently dropped a photo on the work table in front of the painting: himself as a young man in the 60s, astride a big Harley either parked or crawling along in Quebec City. The bike was in the style favored by the cops, featuring the classic windshield curved in the shape of a bishop’s mitre. It was instantly apparent the painting was inspired by the photo. Examining it I felt I was looking at some modernized version of a Greek kouros, a young man at peak physical strength, still in confident possession of his future possibilities, no need for any helmet, while giving off the vibe, just a little, of the dandified élan of a flaneur with his shoulder-length hair grazing the white cardigan above the white dress pants and brown dress shoes. He’s also flaunting an untied scarf or tie around his neck, emerging out of a high-collared blue shirt.

When I looked back at the painting to reconcile it with the photograph, I was freed up by Nikola’s choices in acrylic that submerged the documentary facts of the moment but left behind the spirit, the energy that gave the figure poetic form and surrounded it. It would be an excess of interpretative licence to be too literal about the meaning of the title in relation to the photograph or Nikola’s life. But it’s safe to conclude that the artist, the older man, had sought to capture something of the transformative potential or ambition of the younger man whose ego was still in formation, apparently unafraid of what’s to come in and around his life.

To be clear, here was a guy on the make, maybe not the guys in Easy Rider on unstable choppers but you get the sense the young man is on a journey of adventure and risk, come hell or high water. If he’d claimed to be a champion boxer or a CIA contractor or a movie director – and I’m not saying he’s ever claimed these things – I wouldn’t dismiss him out of hand. He once told me that in his teens in the Krajina region of the Balkans he used to climb alone into the mountains and sleep or meditate while poisonous snakes circled him without biting. I’ve heard him report detailed conversations he’s had with famous Canadian politicians he knew from his years painting portraits on street corners – Rene Levesque and Pierre Trudeau among them. There’s always been a larger-than-life quality to his presence and his stories about his life.

True and plain disclosure: my zeroing in on “transformation” as one of the subjects or themes of Nikola’s painting discussed above was a predictable impulse for me after many years of thinking about his work. Because if there’s one constant in the multi-decade arc of his production and his life, it’s his commitment to change, to perpetual innovation, in how he creatively tells the human story – and lives it.

Sixty-three years ago while in his teens, Nikola arrived in Canada from the former Yugoslavia after escaping from a refugee camp in Italy and navigating other dangers in migratory violence. Since then he has created a body of work that should establish him as one of our most accomplished living artists. Take a walk through this website and you’ll see works from an artist of the first rank, indicative of an astonishingly generative and enduring facility for innovation along with a virtuoso’s expertise in much older, time-tested techniques in painting, drawing, watercolor, etching, printmaking, photography and sculpture.

Over the years Nikola has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Toronto and Montreal and at international art fairs. His work is held in many collections, some of significant size, mostly in North America. As much work as there is in private hands today, Nikola exemplifies what is likely an alien concept to those with career ambitions in the art world: he’s an outsider, by instinct and action, although his work is not outsider art as it’s defined these days. The art reveals Nikola much engaged in an informed dialogue – and often in conflict – with many of the art movements of the past century, including those that define the present moment. So he’s not in any practical way an outsider artist, regardless of being self-taught.

His outsiderness is energized in the first place by an entrepreneurial mantra, let’s call it: a desire to manage his own career exclusively on his own terms. One of the first portrait street painters in Montreal and Quebec City during the late 1960s, Nikola parlayed the returns from that venture into real estate, construction businesses, the ownership of commercial art galleries and, lucratively for a short period, a professional gambling career, all towards securing his financial independence to work on his art.

At root, he’s the antithesis of the academic artist, and negligent to a fault of the implicit imperative to synchronize his production with the latest issues fanned up to institutional or salon importance. Like, for example, being on the right (or wrong!) side of the culture wars. This is not to say, as the work on this website suggests, that Nikola isn’t alert to contemporary inequalities in our social or economic relations, or the dystopian possibilities in in our politics, in our tumble into environmental ruin, in the consequences to democratic norms from globalized capitalism. It’s just that his art burns on a longer temporal fuse than the half-life of a tweet or art fair booth.

Early in his career Nikola was clocked by critics as an Expressionist, partial to the drama of the figure, reliant on the tropes of a kind of bravura gesturalism. Predictably this type of art only made him more of an outsider in the critical zeitgeist of the times. In the 60s when he was starting out as an artist, he felt at odds with the local acolytes of high Greenbergian theory who proceeded from the idea that advanced painting, ideally, should ascend into a heavenly domain of formal or abstracted purity where artists would mainly speak to one another – and to critics – in ever-more abstruse visual codes. In contrast Nikola felt strongly that, as an artist, devolving into pictorial outcomes understood or relevant mainly to the avant-garde, or the advanced sensibility, so to speak, was creative incest – a crime against a more enlightened truth of art’s purpose in the cultural mix. Against the critical grain, he has nonetheless remained committed all through his career to metaphor-rich narratives – even when the work is, objectively, resonant with abstract properties.

His outsiderness was doubtless further exacerbated by his dismissal of the Duchampian or Beuysian credo that anyone can be an artist and anything can be art, or that art of quality can be produced out of chance operations or found objects untouched by the finder. Nikola saw in these viewpoints not the liberation of art from elitist connoisseurship but a twisted celebration or subverting degradation of what innovation in art can and should be. These views were rarely welcome in art scenes of substance that aspired to creating tomorrow’s art.

Regardless of Nikola’s views on the art world, the hindsight exploration of his work over six decades reveals a sustained commitment to experimentation and innovation. As his palette evolved, the paintings, drawings and works-on-paper continued to dial in human figures, his storytelling infused with themes and metaphors related to the vulnerability of the individual against the deforming realities of oppression in all its forms. But these markers of artistic vision, which do not nearly constitute the range of Nikola’s interests or vocabulary, shouldn’t be interpreted as a limiting focus on the personal or figurative correctness. Philosophically, he demonstrates a nuanced engagement – and, at times, ferocious disagreement – with so-called settled science on the origins and evolutionary laws of the universe, the design of consciousness, and the peculiarities of the human spirit invested into us by epigenetics. Put simply, there’s a lot to see – and think about, at length.

It’s not so hard to convey what Nikola has rejected. Harder to assess is what he’s embraced without studying, not just scanning, his work. In a way, given how Nikola brings together technical innovation with philosophical depth and scientific inquiry, he evokes for me the multi-disciplinary polymaths of the Italian Renaissance. It’s not an outlandish comparison. In that highly romanticized era of cultural production, when professional specialization wasn’t the necessity it is in our credential-obsessed information society, it was possible for a gifted artist to also be a scientist, architect, engineer and philosopher. Nikola hasn’t formally worn all those hats in a way that would keep a licensing board happy but should you spend any serious time with his art you’ll sense that the work communes with and makes visible the forces that make the world go around, the planets spin and our cosmos mystify.

It’s too early of course – and probably not even necessary – to belabor the parallels between Nikola and the Renaissance forebears he views as his models – Leonardo or Alberti, for example. But surely the depth and diversity of his intellectual interests are an arresting complement to the visceral power of his work shown on this website, and provide another incentive to recognize and celebrate his contributions to art and the world.

Nikola’s still working and vigorously creating today in his early eighties. It’s exciting to think where that will lead, given the richness and range of what he has accomplished already over six decades in making a unique contribution to the art of our times and for time yet to come. 

A Long Legged Grasshopper Acrylic On Canvas, 48 x 60 Inches ©nikolanikola

NIKOLA NIKOLA Nikola on Harley Davidson, 1968, Quebec City

NIKOLA NIKOLA - working on sculpture for the show Lunchbox Remains, 1996

NIKOLA NIKOLA in studio, 2024