Tomislav Nikolic: On The World Stage

Nikolic framed the works in museum glass, which both reflects the viewer making them a part of the work and also plays up the idea of looking through layers.

He has also developed a technique of blending marble dust with his paints, giving the paint the quality of being both opaque and translucent. They are works that show how colour and light cannot be pulled apart.

His focus on experiential qualities is also shown through the title he chose for his two exhibitions last year: By an endeavor to understand. It’s a phrase taken from the writings of Alice Bailey. Nikolic is fascinated by esoteric philosophies and much of Bailey’s writings are about telepathy. The way Bailey describes it, telepathy is a catch-all term for intuited meaning and non-verbal forms of communication.

Nikolic’s work seems very keyed in to this idea that there are ways of communicating that we have yet to understand. In the same way that scientific studies about chemical signaling and pheromones don’t tell us much about why we fall in love, Nikolic is probing the mechanics of how simply looking at something can make us feel a certain way.

For a past body of work, Eidos, he took a series of paintings from the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria – almost entirely figurative works – and interpreted them in his abstract style. They included a small reclining nude by Henri Matisse, Duncan Grant’s The Bathers and Picasso’s Weeping Woman. He wanted to isolate and distil their essence as he saw and experienced it. In some, the reference point is scale, something that makes a work relatable to the human figure. In others, it was the tiniest of chromatic borrowings. But for some it was nothing direct. It was just a feeling – however it might have got there.