INSTALLATION BY NIKOLA NIKOLA

DONALD BRACKETT FOR CFJ 91.1FM ‘ON THE ARTS’ WITH HOST EARL TOPPING

D.B.      Rose Rongits Contemporary Art is showing, at 80 Spadina, in Suite 313, an installation called  Clocks Are Ringing, and the interesting thing for those who are familiar with Nikola’s bold, large, expressionistic canvasses-it’s almost like going in to a restaurant and finding a new menu, and there’s a bit of shock and it takes some adjustment. He has, instead of maybe three or four large canvasses - we’ve discussed his work in the past – normally very powerful, somewhat European expressionist style – we now have an installation of I think 200 works on paper, that are mounted completely on the gallery walls, about 40’ x 8’ in a grid. Now they’re very precisely placed. They’re all different sizes of paper so some of them are large drawings, large enough to be framed and looked at as individual works of art. What happens is, they merge into one piece. It’s almost like a Gestalt occurs, where you can’t look at any individual piece in the grid without having it bleed into its neighbour. And the other interesting development is that he has included sculpture. He’s starting to enter into the third dimension, and there are some painters that perhaps get tempted to do sculpture more than others, and it seems to me that there’s a model for this kind of work – I don’t think that Nikola will mind being compared to Georg Baselitz, who in the eighties was – and still is – a German expressionist, but whose work became so physical, so muscular, as Nikola’s also was, that it basically began to develop appendages, attachments; collage work would start to grow on his paintings, and the last show that we discussed indeed had pieces, fragments of real-world objects attached. Now he’s essentially turned into a legitimate sculptor. He has wood-carved heads that are poplar, they’re very large, figurative heads that appear to be speaking to each other and having a conversation. It’s almost as if they’re the embodiment of what images in the paintings are about.

            E.T.      What, are they around some totem?  There’s wood chips, they’re gathered around a pile of wood chips, and there’s a pole coming out of the centre, is it just a beam? Or is it a part of the art?

 D.B.      It’s a beam of the architecture of Suite 313 at 80 Spadina. But it does appear to be, I mean, the irony there is that it’s made of wood itself, and the wood chips appear to be the conversation or the poetry that these people are exchanging. And what they’re really talking about, is what is going on in the world, and that’s what concerns Nikola in his painting. It’s about basically Clocks Are Ringing, the title refers to the limited amount of time we have to wake up from the various conflicts we have – the social, political, economic conflicts that appear to be tearing the world apart. This is an example of an artist also who I think is an optimist, because he still believes, and I’m not sure many people do, that art can change things. He’s an artist the believes that in the activism of art, by making statements in art, you can wake people up. And this I think is admirable, because a lot of us become somewhat cynical, and we, and lot of artists, tend to explore aesthetic or conceptual or intellectual concepts at the exclusion I guess of the real conflicts in the real world.

 E.T.      This is an interesting view of his art, but somebody else may come into this gallery, look up on the wall and think it was some grade four class from a school has exhibited their work on the wall with a central theme, they said: “Okey kids, use these colours, and then go to it.” You know, because it does look little messy!

 D.B.      It’s not actually messy.  The interesting thing is, it’s a very large space, and what occurs is, at first it looks like someone has done an excavation of a studio, and revealed a day-to-day – drawings, sketches, thoughts, visual thoughts, really – of an artist. But then you realize that each one of these is part of a coherent whole, and there is actually a kind of coherent chaos going on. And there is a kind of archaeology that takes place, and it does look like someone has performed a dig on an artist’s ideas. But it’s very – it’s very positive kind of development, there’s a progression involved from the three shows that I’ve seen. First of all, the two things that interest me are that he’s outside the art market for this show. He started out with a dealer, and he had big paintings, and they still sell, his paintings are quite popular, the big expressionistic paintings. He’s taking a chance here, because he’s producing work that can’t be sold. He’s producing work that is strictly about thinking and feeling, about going into environment, so there are three elements to the installation: the 200 drawings, the carved heads of poplar, which are quite striking in themselves, and they’re going to crack and age and turn brown, and also text that’s been applied to the wall. The daring aspect there, in having the text applied to the wall, is that the text, they’re stanzas, they’re kind of poetic abstract linguistic versions of his drawings and paintings, they take up the place where his normally big paintings would go, which are art objects, commercial art objects, so I admire two things really: that he’s developing – taking chances and taking risks, and also that for this installation, that he’s stepped outside the art market, that he’s not trying to sell anything, he’s just trying to stop people long enough to have the think. And there’s an elegance to the chaos here, that’s very striking.

 E.T.      The exhibition by NIKOLA NIKOLA continues at 80 Spadina –

 D.B.      Continues until December 2 – and I think it’s a very good opportunity to see impressive aspect of this expressionistic direction.