Elemental Forms
Croatian-Bulgarian-American artist Nadezda Nikolova (born in 1978 in Serbia), based in Oakland, California, studied 19th-century phototrophic printing (capturing light energy) processes.e century at the University of Kentucky and the George Eastman Museum. Drawing on this training in early photographic techniques, so prized and still used today, she produced photograms on wet collodion plates (called "ferrotypes"). These imaginary landscapes were created in the darkroom in a very short time, before the light-sensitive surface dried, using brushes and paper masks. At the boundary between photography and drawing, this practice, combining the photographic process with the painterly gesture, unsettles our perception of the image, which seems to float between two worlds or stagnate in a latent space.
Drawing undulating flows of saturated or ashen blacks, of immaculate or speckled whites, the plates assembled to create large compositions decompose the Elementary shapes landscapes (to borrow the title of his series) Elemental Forms) in sequences, as if to stop or "make tangible" time and multiply or rearticulate space.
In her synthetic and textured landscapes, one is reminded of the vast desert terraces of Georgia O'Keeffe. Like the legendary figure of American modernism, it is, in fact, the telluric force and the "energetic imprint," but also the "mystery" of "geological forms" enlivened by light, that the photographer, a graduate in environmental science, has sought to convey in this series begun in 2018. A kind of physical experience, an internalization of the landscape, an "immanence" of the earth, has led the artist toward increasing abstraction. Thus, in her Landscape Rearticulated (begun in 2019) deconstructing the landscape into abstract geological-organic formations. This is also true of his latest cascades of desynchronized waves entitled Immanent Forms inviting us to reinvent the perception of the landscape.
Elemental Forms – Esther Woerdehoff Gallery
36, rue Falguière, Paris 15e
Until March 25
