Donald Brackett for CJRT 91.1FM “ON THE ARTS” with host EARL TOPPINGS

E.T.      Donald bracket is here to talk about New Paintings by Nikola Nikola on view at the Luba Bystriansky Gallery in Toronto.

FLARE Magazine calls the artist a “major talent who is shaking up the culture of the nineties.” Donald Brackett, is he doing that?

 D.B.      Earl, there is lot about these paintings that made me shake. To begin with, definitely. And I think it’s true that he mirrors the issues and fears and concerns that we have in the nineties. This is a relatively new gallery, the Luba Bystriansky Gallery, and the artist is a new to me. He has very strong imagery, so he is “shaking up” a lot of morays. The dealer in fact pointed out that although the imagery is very strong, there’s a lot of social, political, and even spiritual subject matter, some of which is occasinately violent in tone. There’s an element of seduction in his paintings, and that’s interesting because it’s a contradiction-at first, you’re put off a bit by the strength of the images, but it is true-you’re drawn into pictures’ environment, and you are seduced-but once you’re there, it occasionally a threatening dimension.

 E.T.      This is a very strong social, political, spiritual mix-everything from political to Christian symbols.

 D.B.      He mixes everything together, and the reason a lot of the images are so- there’s a kind of vortex of images in his paintings- they’re very large, and contain practically everything he can say about a particular issue. A friend of mine, who is also in the arts, saw some of the invitations and photographs I was dealing with and said:” This guy can really paint.” And I think that’s one of the best ways to describe it. He knows how to use paint. And I think it’s fair to say that he is really Expressionist painter, an Expressionist artist. He’s not a neo-or a new Expressionist, I think he’s a real Expressionist painter, and by that, I mean that he deals with extraordinary visceral material. And, I said they were very large, some of them are 8’ x 10’, and they literally envelop the viewer, and you’re in a situation you can’t escape from-very strong.

 E.T.      The colour is also strong, I gather.

 D.B.      The colour is one of the things that gives the paintings their combination of beauty and brutality, and this is the thing that this artist intrigues me, a reason he compels me because-one of the paintings, for instance, is called “Portrait of God”. It’s one of the largest ones. And this is literally a vortex of every kind of physical information you can imagine. And inside it, there is even a scrap of a Francis Bacon painting. And this struck me; the one relationship I think he has to earlier Expressionist kind of painting is to Francis Bacon. And Francis Bacon, people remember, really included a lot of violent imagery in his portraits, and a lot of these paintings by Nikola are indeed portraits, and some of them, unfortunately, seem to be portraits of us.