SilentBoy: when you fall in love with someone you’re just falling in love with the way the other person sees you. inner2 chat room, mygay.com. March 2002, 2002
acrylic and marble dust on canvas
200 x 200 cm x 2
Walls can talk and these are carrying on in the manner of old friends. Like mirrors facing each other reflections are exchanged continually within this work to the point where perspective is completely lost.
The rigid squares and the confines of the space contain the work and force the focus of each canvas on the other. Two canvasses on opposite walls, some distance apart but securely held in the other's gaze. Solid colour planes, one pink one red, enclose each canvas but they remain seemingly in need of the other. The work might have been physically contained by its closed geometry but it is seething, all the time the colour attempting to resist the constraints of the flat surface.
On entering the space I feel like I might be intruding on a private conversation. But the claustrophobic space within which the work is hung refuses it any claim to exclusivity. The depth, intensity and scale are all overwhelming.
There is no room for discrete eavesdropping, or detached thoughts. It is more a case of entering the domain of the work and fitting in.
Fears of disrupting a personal conversation are misplaced. It continues - but the subject turns to me.
Nikolic's inspiration for this work derives from thoughts of love and the other, self love and narcissism. When we fall in love is it with the reflection of ourselves in the other? Can we ever see ourselves except as we are seen by others?
Pink and red - the surface and the interior.
Mirrors.
Do you … are you … like me?
Kate MacNeill
11 June 2002