Tomislav Nikolic
Cardinal Mutable Fixed
Anyone familiar with astrology knows the twelve zodiac signs can be grouped according to four elements-- fire, earth, air, and water—each of which affects the profile of the signs it governs. There is however a further way of organizing the twelve signs, grouping them into three quadruplicities according to their “quality:” cardinal (enterprising and commanding), mutable (subject to change), or fixed (stable).
Tomislav Nikolic has referred to astrology in other exhibitions where it functioned simply as an organizing principle, a way of generating and combining work. Here, recourse to the three astrological qualities allowed for an exhibition to be conceived as a whole, the three groups of works existing in a relationship that, given one’s inclination, could be read astrologically, or, more to the point, can be approached formally. Nikolic is a painter who starts with astrology, when the need arises, but he ends somewhere very different.
His painting process is time- and labour-intensive. Eighty coats of paint or more is not uncommon; what results are paintings that can suggest disembodied fields of colour, hazes of subtly shifting chromatic effects produced by the particularities of a painting’s place on any wall. Yet as much as Nikolic works—for weeks sometimes on an individual canvas—to make this possible, and as much as the works’ scale and low-to-the-ground installation produce the effect that we could walk into them and they could enfold us, they are more than the sum of the effects they produce. With Nikolic’s longstanding attention to painted “frames” on the canvas and the varieties of painted edges that contain them, these works want to remind us that they are physical objects too.
Icon painting’s reverence for process and its meditative intensity were important early sources. Process and intensity continue to define his painting practice which now nods as well to the history of Western painting, here in very subtle acknowledgements of Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko. The stretcher size of the “Cardinal” paintings is identical to one Bacon used while the “Fixed” paintings owe their scale to Rothko; in addition, Bacon’s gold frames have been transmuted into halos by the optical effect of gold leaf on the back of the “Cardinal” canvases. These acknowledgements are almost invisible for the halo effect isn’t constant and scale registers physically as much as visually but Nikolic’s painting relies on tiny subtleties for its effect. If that effect finds no ready place in painting’s history-- the term “modernist abstraction” scarcely begins to account for his work—it may be because Nikolic is doing something genuinely his own.
Ingrid Periz, March 2010