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Nils Nova - [ Traduire cette page en français ]
NILS NOVA
From Stefan Banz
Nils Nova’s use of painting is an attempt to exploit the blindness of coloured paint and spaces as a means to reach the light of the visible. This is also evident in his earlier, large-scale photographic laser prints of blind television sets which – because they have been turned off – become mirrors of their surroundings. For a brief moment, we seem to catch a glimpse of our own image, like in van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Wedding”, until we realise that these “panoramas” – born out of blindness – reflect the places where the artist was when he photographed the screens.
Seeing in blindness, being blind in seeing. This paradox is likewise present in his first photographic work where he examines physical resemblance between people. Starting out from found pictures of celebrities, he went out into the streets to look for their anonymous, real counterparts, had them strike the same pose and then took a picture. An endless play on similarity and difference, sameness and otherness. Everybody is a celebrity, and every celebrity is an everyman. There is no similarity, and everything is related to everything else. It is like the steaming bathtub in the watercolour (Illustration 5), where the water rids itself of gravity, steaming up weightlessly. Is this reality, real experience, or merely a fantasy of the imagination turned into a picture? It is both at the same time.
From Ulrich Loock
His abstract painting: colour fields are applied thinly over a large surface, different colours abut and partially overlay one another, single colours change into different colours, different kinds of paint application leave behind their characteristic traces. On the edges of the picture, sometimes even in its centre, the expanse of the paint is bordered by rigidly imposed strips – this produces the ambivalence between the autonomy of painting and its mimetic elements.
From Peter Fischer
Nova shows the source of the images also in his film-strip photographs, which are depicted complete with perforations. These are the rejects of the cutting-room floor, isolated images from sequences damaged during screening or fallen victim to the internal censorship of erotic films. In their serial arrangement they suggest a connection, and the result is often an intriguing interplay of both form and content. Such parallels—arbitrary or intended?—are also Nova’s subject in a group of works showing portraits of couples with some facial similarity, for instance Luis und Nils, in which a photograph of Luis Buñuel confronts a staged self-portrait of the artist. Everything is potentially linked with everything else by means of the simultaneity of media transmission and through universal availability. Nils Nova lends his works the character of objects, not just by revealing the traces of his pictures’ origin but also by conceiving them as spatial installations. As viewers, we become a part of the work. This is not necessarily a new development in art history, but Nova’s liking for the narrative fragment, his playful approach and his keen wit are extremely stimulating, and as long as the works retain the equilibrium mentioned above these qualities are a guarantee of truly subtle artistic pleasure.
