Artist Statement and Articles on Art of Jasna Nikolic
When artist is an authentic witness and confessor of faith, the art becomes passage to the invisible world. In "Reverse Perspective", artist reviles existence of something beyond the obvious fact of miracle, found in "everyday" - the discovery of God's presence, developing the endless possibilities of "practicing imagination", and focusing direction towards achieving the highest goal: redemption, Revelation and Salvation. We can feel at first hand the presence of the Holy Spirit, of Its Uncreated Energy. It all has one goal - the change of the entire visible world Its complete, essential transfiguration. At some times, we simply do not know if we are on earth or in heaven. We feel, with our entire being, that God is with us at that time. Truly with us. Those moments of stepping into eternity, I have named "eterniments".[...]
Jasna Nikolic, Artist Statement
Articles:
Hugeness of the small: Towards a
neoiconological celebration of
unbroken details – a neobyzantine ray from Byzantium unforgotten
"These little creatures, of
unlimited possibilities for transfiguration: these little people –
owls, owls-children, three-eyed friends, polyps, neuronomorphs,
dolphins and salamanders: these tiny drawings, the microscopy of the
suggested: worlds so modest and tentative, being perpetually
self-sketched in the nacre shade of imagination in order to survive
manifestation itself — that imagination which is led to rhizomically
pass through hyperinflations of the obvious (avoiding to tread the
blistering tyrannosaurus-ego of the common) — that post-industrial
world gushing forth from the future of the New Civilization of
transparent yet unaccountable harmonies of Meaningful Love without
cause, explanation or end — those cracklings of all-embracing silence:
moving stillness projected through deployments of self-decreased
delicates of micro-natures made of feathers, little legs, little clouds
of the moss of dreams (growing from all sides of inverted perspectives)
— that vision of depth ‘otherring’ the spin-televising of Being and
resurfacing our misplaced need for transfiguration — that is the
grounding all-uniting isonic hum melodiously overflowing from Jasna’s
neo-iconographic celebration of the sharded as such: invoked to heal a
wholeness bereft of meaning – the first metanoetic step being the
imagining of Beauty of details, contingencies, subtlenesses,
vulnerablenesses as in fact the presence of the impacting gentleness of
a supra-humble Loving God who shies away precisely by showing his
small, sharded, trampled, forgotten creatures huge in fact by their
amazing myriadovalent complexity of small hands, legs, proboscises,
fluffs: by exposing miracles of their micro-quarkian sneaks through
(almost immaterial) corridors of omni-comprehensive levels of the
pictorial — that is the world where the impossible is possible: that is
the world as it is for Jasna, the world as it shall be for us = those
multi-eyed ecstasies of little strokes that liberate nature for making
the impossible possible — a world of satiating our salamander desires,
sticking out and around the edges of desire itself, rounding corners
that take hold of the 361st degree: desires thrown towards the Meaning
of beauty’s beauty, making the pieces of a broken world – us – become
pieces-of-wholeness, redeemed through this dolphin-seraphimic ocean of
art or omni-possible love of re-appropriated childhood: loving even the
smallest hair on the reverse of a leaf growing in the affluent desert
of spiritually aristocratic regards towards art. Until then, let us
allow the joy-creating sorrow of a neo-Byzantine sheppardess of the
shard invoke these impossibly small creatures of unbroken detail, let
them witness the omnipotent greatness of an all-focused and all-healing
considerateness of the Over-Beauteous delicate Wholenes of His Love: in
which the impossible becomes possible, where the detail is greater than
the general, the part being transformable yet irreplaceable…"
Bogdan
Lubardic,
Philosopher and Theologian, Orthodox Theological Faculty
Belgrade University
“Caught in the manic maelstrom of J. Nikolic work is a frantic world. Faces meet, greet and dance their wild dance amid lightning striations. The energy and power of these segments from life is delightfully overwhelming. And there is irony too. Nikolic has chosen to present her ideas as iconic fragments. Ironic icons perhaps. Each little painting is a slice of time representing an esoteric world which so keenly mirrors our own.”
Robin Dutt, Art Critic and Curator
The first time I saw her work, I was instantaneously seduced by the images applied onto wooden panels which I call “contemporary icons”.Having grown up in an east-European culture, and now residing in London. Jasna has managed to conserve and translate her artistic convictions in full strength. On the other hand she makes us thing that her roots could be found in Hieronymus Bosch. Expressing herself in a figurative language, her writing is free, fast and concise. Jasna thus allows us to gain access anew to the world and images of our childhood – her work could be called a Kaleidoscope of the emotional.”
Oliver
de
Cayron, Artist
and Founder of “art-Scenes Revue”
“...In search for the inhabitants of her subconscious world, the artist's expeditions follow a meditative, meandering, spiralling path. Creatures nestling there take the possession of the pictorial space and determining its internal workings. The line, the basic graphic element, not only circumscribes, outlines and shapes, but remains the umbilical cord which connects forms and figures with their creator...
The artist allows herself to be led by the drawn line and the sudden stroke of brush, by ink-spots, coloured stains and surface textures. Unrestrained by any preconceptions, her lines ensnare images and trace silhouettes, deepening in the process the picture surface and gradually opening up virtual dimensions... The eye and the hand operate according to an improvisational principle, discovering and amplifying visual clues, and bring this assortment of fragments into coherent visual structure. There is the psychic softness of the sleepwalker in Jasna's work. Her playfulness delays the making of choices until all forms are assembled and finally require definition. Some constellations, still situated between idea and form, are retained in a state of ambiguity...
Nikolic creates the magic condition in which Gothic demons, gargantuan half-creatures and grotesque but lovely hybrids thrive and gain reality. Their whispers, giggles twitters and little games fill the imaginary space and spin a strange expanding story. The narrative is carried by these phantoms and pictograms and by fully formed characters who, in harmony or in contrast influence the energy and atmosphere of each painting. This narrative is a chain of free associations quite similar to the poetic investigations of the surrealist into the patterns and absurdities of our nightly dreams and the accidents, chances and fantasies of our waking hours.
A bestiary of shapes crawls, walks, jumps, floats or flies. There are noses, arms, legs, wings and tails, which freed from the body, lead their own existence. People; half-men, half-women: composites of fish and plant, tree and bird, spirits borne by the sea or the air, coexist with winged ships, men on wheels, long-necked geese, dragonflies and innumerable others. They exist on canvas, on wood panels and sheets of paper in a poetic world where, smilingly, they contemplate the dream which has made them.”
Lutz Becker, Artist and Director
