The solo painting exhibition of Nikos Nikolaos at Polyhedros is extended until Wednesday 24/04/2024. A tour and discussion with the painter will take place this Saturday, April 20, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Nikos Nikolaou was born in Patras and attended painting lessons in the workshop of Spyros Sokaris. He has had a continuous artistic presence since 1985 with individual and participation in group exhibitions. His works are in private collections and in public places inside and outside Greece.
Travel in stillness
A… “conversation” with the exhibition of Nikos Nikolaos at the Polyhedron of Mary Sidiras
Nikos Nikolaou transfers the feeling of contemporary art installations to the micro-scale of the painting. And this is because in all his paintings an undermined by the same realism renders neighborhoods of de facto chaos, almost rendered with their internal properties. It is a peculiar arrangement of cardboard boxes, Greek flags, wooden boxes, scraps of paper titles, etc., all having, once upon a time, a utilitarian value, perhaps even an emotional or other type of ideological marking, now exposed to wear and tear and a forced coexistence in the painting and in our gaze.
Although the avant-gardes, above all the Dadaists, gave a lot to the visual consecration of objects incompatible with each other, allogenous, so to speak, however the originary principles – which are not the only ones – are not enough to indicate the idiom of a manner that is recognizable and yet fluid, unclassified in her personal conversation with herself and her viewers. The touch of N. Nikolaos, however, sometimes looks worked like a well-layered oil painting and sometimes restless, as if pushed by an expressionist wind.
All digested in a personal alphabet, from the color scale to the thematic obsession. The new through repetition haunts the painter and exasperates his searches torturously. His color scale draws out the earthy colors as a general impression, giving the illusion of the tangible, a smooth, for example, cardboard box surface, objects aged, marked by time and their uselessness, embedded within it are photographs of ancestors, legible phrases ala conceptual art (we read clearly, for example, with white paint on an “Art” panel), etc. – like the life that travels, marked by loss, like every life, until it is reduced, being its chaotic self, to the order of the image.
We pull out clothes racks, paintings within paintings, one, e.g., with a large moon, displayed as a painting within a painting, flags multiplied, painted photos (not collages) always in rotten pinks, reds dripping with a dramatic past, the last of the dry blood form, mournful painting, nourished by the lost flesh of personal and collective history. “EFLEKTON” we read, “EUTHRAUSTON” we read, as Nikolaos’ art now packs landscapes, blurred expressionistic images of, for example, a “green” memory, with the canyons and slopes we once traversed. A journey in stillness, in the context of a life, a country, an irrevocably protesting memory that keeps coming back.
However, we also return to the painter’s color scale to note the following: The above-mentioned color impression of an abundant ocher, from which it was composed, after an infinitesimal time. In or around a storage and once travel medium or its hint (boxes and cardboard boxes), wild blue, deep crimson, the scandalous presence of white, as with its absoluteness it geometries, establishes unexpected structures or composes “purgatory” clearings, keep dust off a strongly implied journey.
Although the symbolic reading attracts my attention, the painting of N. Nikolaos is not decoded by reductions. Simultaneously follower and follower of reality, it excludes and deconstructs every reading. The painting in question resembles a deliverable material that, through a long, difficult journey, arrived, with all the dust and brilliance of time on its body, at its destination.
We can even talk about a “proseological” mainly exploitation of the valuables gathered by this multi-year journey, a quiet emphasis on the world of the unnecessary, of things, of domestic habits that silently sew most of life with our soul. And furthermore, let’s talk about a metonymic relationship between the paintings and life, as if each of these paintings with the postal oujya, boxes with naughty material to be delivered, as if, therefore, each painting becomes its own destiny, as it depicts a delivery – composition of stacked and anarchically delivered deliverables.
The second part of the exhibition consists of significantly smaller black and white square paintings, made with pencil, ink and pastel, which create the idea of relief as if it were a fraud, which is nevertheless present, as another figure is embedded in the painting as if looking or simply lying down in front of him (eg a crouching figure, a tree, etc.). Distance creates the illusion of inclusion we mentioned above, proximity works correctively by restoring the real. Paintings that bring memories of 18th & 19th century, romantic illustration of European fairy tales, an emphasis on the strange through realism and also a gothic look, slanted, from a distance, in the framed border of the painting. A cinematic intensity is released from these small paintings that resemble traps of fears or even desires, dream diaries, with a renewed, in short, writing about the unconscious.
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