Composition IIII 1963

Nikos Nikolaou made this painting, Composition IIII, using brushstrokes of tan and brown to carve out two nude figures. I imagine Nikolaou circling around these forms, adding layer upon layer, pushing and pulling the figures into being. You can almost see the ghost of previous marks beneath the top layer of paint! I feel like the artist is asking, how can I capture the weight of the body? How can I make them feel both present and abstract? There’s something really beautiful about the way the brown background seeps into the ochre figures, blurring the distinction between what is body, and what is ground. He lets the figures bleed into the background, in a way that reminds me of work by late modernists like Philip Guston, who were also obsessed with line and form. What would it be like to spend your life just trying to get the form right? I feel like that’s what Nikolaou is chasing here.