Love like patos Modernity

( or about paintings in E minor)

The Layered Nature of Nikola Žigon's Paintings United Under the Title Paintings un E minor it is not reflected in the ambiguity of the so-called "work in progress," but rather in the swirling amalgam of gestures and colors across several planes of space: formal-pictorial, psychological, and physical (gestural). While primarily relying on color, the artist simultaneously does not abandon form, figure, or gesture, seeking an equal share of all elements in embodying the psycho-physical presence of the painter within their own work.

A new positive experience for Žigon was the freer activity of gesture across a broad space, as well as the acceptance and establishment of new rules of play, spontaneously born or liberated from those white spaces. Inspired by Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E Minor, Žigon creates an artistic world that is not merely a symbiosis of artistic forms, but an integration of the structure, rhythms, and tones of an art form like music into his own world of painting. This "aspiration toward a musical state" leads the artist into the theme of the energy of love, as an omnipotent force that dissolves forms and the energy of the magical aspect of seducing the world. This is not merely a ceremonial game; it is a discourse whose energy is extensive, radiant, and esoteric—a love that manifests as expression, warmth, and communication. The love that Nikola Žigon "speaks" of in his paintings is far removed from the obscene culture of today, which emphasizes expression, confession, exposure, and the liberation of the subconscious in a direction that erases all mystery or enigma from the artwork, heading toward the obscenity of a revealed and proclaimed truth. In a world where "love potions" and challenges no longer exist, Žigon believes in the primacy of energy and the laws inscribed in the depths of the human heart, as a salvific path through the artificial confusion of signs.

At the heart of every game, including this one whose rules were established by the artist himself, lies another hidden perspective—that it should remain a mystery. This is why the artist turns to a theme like love, not only as a subject brimming with all the mysteries of the world but also as a theme that serves as a solution. The charm of the invented rules is precisely what creates the intensity of the interplay of colors and "music" in Žigon's paintings. The Mirror of Love, The Gift of Angels The Magic List, Dolce Vita itd.

The artist introduces love as a leitmotif, but not in the sentimental way that sentimental culture does; rather, he approaches it as the most incomprehensible and diffuse "crystalline state" or some enigmatic duel, where everything turns into a liquid solution, even into a gaseous state, or more precisely, into an already defined "musical state." To put it in Baudrillardian terms: "Everything is dissolvable in love, everything dissolves through love." Žigon approaches this theme as a principle of creation. Stripped of regularity and traditional compositional structure, the main tool for shaping Slika u e-molu It was the art of automatic "écriture," which, from the artist's offensive movement and bodily gestures, produced a kind of psychogram, transforming lyrical feeling into an immediate visual trace on the canvas, expanded to large dimensions. The canvas was understood as a space in which two planes of the image were created: the archetypal image and the symbol. Since it is a matter of automatic painting, as Žigon does not resort to sketches, the activity primarily focuses on recognizing symbols and their possible meanings. This is a technique of automatic painting that does not produce figures, but rather emerges from them. Thus, Žigon accepts them as an expression in itself, but also as a kind of naturalistic symbolism whose purpose is to "decipher the alphabet of the world."

The search for what has been found and the experience that seeks to preserve that feeling significantly obstruct the viewer’s gaze toward the full expression of the automatic action in the paintings. Sequences of gestural activities, with spatula-applied colors "dissolved in music"—as invasive actions into life itself—bring dynamism to the two-dimensional surfaces of the displayed paintings. Relying on rhythm, the collision of forms in space, and the intersection of space with time, where color attracts form and signs attract color, the artist’s visionary endeavor is to "gather" all these "instruments of the poetry of the canvas" in his works. Similar to mural paintings, Žigon’s canvases themselves become a special space that introduces the viewer into the artist’s offered world, into the world of his artistic visions. It is this value orientation and the strengthening of the artistic world around the viewer that form the foundation for the creation of his aesthetic reality—one that is distinct from cognitive and ethical realities, but not indifferent to them.

Marta Vukotić Lazar

Photographs by Srđan Janković