The rest is missing

Solo exhibition of Branko Nikolov

• graphics •

April 16 – May 20, 2021

Vernissage: April 16 (Friday), from 4 to 7 p.m.

Probably carried away by the Nietzschean view of the past as a nest of ruin in which no more substantial one can be conceived future, the tired decadence of nineteenth-century Europe reaches a kind of denial of the historical. This quite naturally generates a process of self-torture with the past by destruction. Ernst Gombrich recalls that at this time “casts of old works of art [used until then for educational purposes] were discarded through the window and smashed in a belated ritual of liberation’. With others words, as David Lowenthal points out – the world has entered an age in which “nothing should be valued so long, to become old’.

Futurists are also inflamed by this idea and a figure like Filippo Marinetti advocates the concept that one should not waste energy on worshiping before the past. Moreover, the poet confidently states that he “provoked a growing aversion to the ancient, to the worm-eaten and the moss-covered’, and his main motive therefore is – ‘to free Italy from her fetid gangrene of professors, archaeologists, Ciceronians and antiquaries. Because for too long this country has been a merchant of second-hand clothes. We intend to free her from the countless museums that cover it like cemeteries’.

Thus the previous aesthetic models have been rejected, and the free verse in poetry, atonal music, abstraction in painting. The success of this project is evidenced by our own present and its associated contemporary art. It is as a part of it let’s also think of the exhibition “The rest is missing” by the artist Branko Nikolov. In her the author as opposed to the processes that generated the swarming of “-isms” in the first half of the last century, with the precision of an archaeologist, with the passion of an antiquarian, p the gaze of a “cultural necrophile” turns to the past. But not just any distant, foreign, but to his/our own.

He returns to his birthplace to document in images (p his inherent sensibility) the world he formerly inhabited. The remote from the great old city a neighborhood that cultural, including political, processes for only half century have been set aside in a cemetery. For the experience, for memories, for dreams. Unperturbed from human presence landscapes, hollowed out by emptiness homes – with hollowed out floors, collapsed under the weight of the sky roofs, with walls dried up by silence, turned into mud again. With broken windows, with locked doors. Empty pens, overrun by drakes fences. In general, a world in which nature is began to swallow up like an unfeeling monster any sign of choral intervention. For a story.

Branko Nikolov refuses to accept the loss of his own past and therefore returns to it anew. But that seems like a long time ago lost its essential role for his present. It doesn’t belong to him. And as if just now that’s why he focused so affectively on it, trying to preserve it, yes save it and reify it with the means of graphic language. And there the rest is missing, and this “leftover” seems to be ourselves.

Consciously or not, this Branco individual crusade Nikolov against “cultural amnesia” unfolds against the background of unprecedented anxiety, in which, paradoxically, the negation of the past appears. The same thing, from which we used to try so hard to get rid of. But did this ever happen can it belong to us again?