A painter’s
counterattack, a fight against the television hegemony in the world of pictures
– or inversely, a capitulation of the painter, disabled by the TV, who fell
asleep and woke up in the moment of subtitles appearing, after the film, that
he did not watch. The project of Ivo Nikić, called, nomen omen, „Subtitles” is
as polysemantic and unapparent as every picture transmitted by TV with no
antenna plugged in. The transmission is disturbed by noise and interference –
and they themselves are opening the great scope of possibilities for the
painter.„Subtitles” is about watching, or maybe even staring - at the TV. The project’s basis is a sequence of pictures, a visualisation of things that man can see, when he falls asleep in front of the TV, and when he wakes up just before the programme ending. He sleeps during the last film of the evening, which he was supposed to see. On the black screen, there are only the final subtitles visible – a long listing of people who produce the film illusion. The director’s assistants, lighting personnel’s substitutes, drivers, couriers – nobody wants to read the never-ending list of The Dream Factory employees. Ivo Nikić is unable to decode the long list of names, even if he wants to, his TV has no antenna and it is deregulated. It results with unreadable, blurred letters, with a TV snow falling on it. In works of Ivo Nikić, the electronic picture material is the main subject, it falls into lines and pixels, its content, which should be transmitted, is lost. His canvas do not show what the TV displayed, it shows the way of displaying it – in some of his paintings we see the screen edge, a fragment of the casing, the producer’s logo – or a light reflection on the screen glass, captured by the painter.
A TV with no antenna plugged in, has some advantages. The signal provided to the tube is weak, the screen shows interference, and so the television is not so persuasive and powerfull anymore. Maybe the discourse is only possible for the painter, if the television is such imperfect and weakened. Disturbed electronic image, deconstructed by noise, for one moment looses the power of holding our eyes still. The glass screen is no longer a mistery, we may look through it and see what is it out there, on the other side.
The key to
„Subtitles” is the phenomenon of vision and looking. It is all about the
viewer’s point of view, he is invited by Nikić to play the role of a
telemaniac, who fell asleep and now he woke up in front of the TV. His eyes are
still tired and he can not see sharp pictures yet. Our own eyes can not be
completely reliable. But, in „Subtitles”, there are also other looks present.
In the space of pictures, there are two other objects placed – two destroyed
armchairs of a telemaniac. One of the chairs fell down. The second one looks
like we could sit on it, but it has some small things on its surface. It seems
like small buttons, but our eyes are lying to us again – in fact, these are
small round pictures of human eyes. In some way, „Subtitles” are watching
themselves and they seem to get out of control. They live their own lives, they
are watched, so they exist before we will manage to take a look at them. Nikić creates a strange dream situation. While contemplating his dark TV nocturnal pictures, we can feel the company of other eyes looking, but no-one actually looks, there is nobody here. In this space, somewhere between dreams and reality, everything is possible, anything could happen. And it actually happens, next to the images of subtitles, blurred by noises, Nikić shows an explosion of colors on canvas. There is a comic-like tiger, which spits the TV noises out of his mouth. Other image is a combination of TV pictures streams, formed in a geometric shape of cat – an electronic monster, a life generated by interferences, one imposed on the other – or by the imagination of viewer, sleeping again and dreaming about watching TV, still.
In „Subtitles”, paintings are put in a small space between the reality concrete and the television virtual world. The small space is a passage to the land of information noise, disturbed transmissions, hallucinations - to the land of things, which do not exist, or at least of what should not be seen. Those pictures of the twilight zone of our perception may not be captured, we can not see it neither in reality, nor in television. Painting is the only, non-replaceable way of showing it.
Stach Szabłowski