Composition 1968

Nikos Nikolaou made this ‘Composition’ with earth tones and bold shapes. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the canvas, wrestling with the forms, trying to pin them down. I imagine Nikos Nikolaou standing before his canvas, stepping back, squinting, then lunging forward again to make a mark. Those ochre figures - are they wrestling, dancing, or just existing together? See how the bodies are outlined with the same ochre paint? It must have been a real back and forth between foreground and background, positive and negative space. That foot, just poking out from the right figure, that small detail gives me a glimpse into his thinking, his process. It reminds me of late Cezanne, or even early Picasso. Artists are always building on what came before, in conversation with each other across time. And for us, the viewers, we get to join that conversation, too.