John Hurrell – 3 April, 2021

Tomislav Nikolic is justifiably much admired for his methodical exploration of painted (on canvas) and wooden frames, arranged in concentric rectangular formations to investigate optical and physical depth-as well as surprise the observant perambulating viewer.

He has had many exhibitions at Fox Jensen McCrory, but this one is a little different with the inclusion of a particularly large work, and two items that exploit wooden/plaster frames with spiky leaf motifs in the corners and edge centres—creating new perimetric linear rhythms as a foil to the standard throbbing pulse that beats against the flat wall.

Nikolic‘s complex works, with their soft and hard edges and narrow fluro planes tucked around corners—or hidden facing the wall—can incorporate over fifteen concentric rectangles seen from the front: as if a woolly-threaded Rothko to be determinedly burrowed into. Plus there are the anti-glare museum glass sheets, iridescent marble dust concoctions, and various types of shiny metallic leaf that act as foils with the more optically stable conventional colour.

With this show, it is the large work that impresses with its grand scale, and the fact that its thick red frame (and the green frame of its neighbour) causes your eye to restlessly travel around the bright outer edges, pinging along the eight accentuating angular points of each work’s perimeter. This implied rotation, that is parallel to the wall, works successfully with the pull and push of the centre.

It is Nikolic‘s unusual manipulation of the viewer’s expectations and the viewer’s body that make these spatially complicated paintings / relief sculptures so intriguing, especially with his deft and inventive placement of linear and planar colour based on (or within) parts of the frame. Each is like a solitary, loaded-up, but exceptionally flavour-rich serving in a meal—that packs in the equivalent of an entire eight course dinner.

John Hurrell

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