Jasna's Profile

From: Great Britain
Joined: April 10, 2008
www.jasnanikolic.com

About Jasna:

On the Art of Jasna Nikolic



“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