Nikola Raspopovic
Nikola Raspopovic wurde in Belgrad (Serbien) geboren. Im Jahr 1991, im Alter von 17 Jahren, verlässt er Jugoslawien und lässt sich in Portugal nieder. In Porto tritt er in die Akademie der Schönen Künste ein, wo er 2003 seinen Abschluss in Malerei macht. Im Jahr 2010 zieht Nikola nach Berlin (Deutschland), wo er immer noch lebt und arbeitet. Seine Arbeit erstreckt sich über Malerei, Zeichnung, Fotografie, Installation und Skulptur, aber sein Hauptwerk ist die Malerei.
Die reine, fast rohe Bewegung und Direktheit seiner Malerei drückt eine sehnsüchtige Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen des künstlerischen Schaffens aus, zu der phantastischen Zeit, in der die Kunst blühte, frei von den Manierismen einer Epoche, frei von den Blicken unterkultivierter Betrachter und Liebhaber konzeptueller Spielereien.
Nikola Raspopovic arbeitet als Künstler im KAOS
Pure, almost crude motion and directness of this painting conveys a wishful return to the origins of artistic creation, to the imaginary time where it flourished, unbound to the mannerisms of an epoch, free of the gaze of under-cultivated beholders and lovers of conceptual gaming.
It expresses a belief of the artist, or rather his conviction of the fact that there is a force, pure and truthful, waiting for the right moment to manifest itself. However, this purity and this truth mustn’t be thought of as whispering, delicate revealings of timeless secrets to the chosen ones. The painter is its conveyor. It must come out in spite of him. It is not always within his grasp, he is more of a channeller than of an able-minded creator. It is a screaming, roaring explosion of energy, cinematic and spectacular, shameless and merciless, like clash of electrified clouds, or armies unaware of anything but the necessity of confrontation. It knows not of peace. However, it is full of silences that may last for thousands of years, due to its cosmic proportions, comparable in an infinitely smaller scale to the ones we perceive moments before a thunderstorm. It is caught up in the exploits of its own power which devours the surroundings as a typhoon devours the unsuspecting scenery. It is not human-like, not moral nor dutiful, and not at all godlike, because it doesn’t contemplate the possibility of innocence.
As a powerful wish of freedom from obscurity, from littleness and fetishism, it is also a blow to the anthropocentric earth rule. It is a scooping up of all moral retrogression, of greed and selfishness, and their minute destruction, but at the same time bears the marks of disaster which does not choose its victims. Therefore, it can serve as a remainder that we are all of us makers of both joy and pain, states which can end without obtaining the satisfaction of explanation, and moreover, states that may come or go, independent of our desert. As the poet put it, golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers come to dust.
Nonetheless, it’s not the easy, guiltless and nihilist destruction of old structures which is the aim of the artist. He is unmovable in his certainty that there is a fundamental good in life and that it can be achieved and lived, in a renewed world, purified of vices of our saturated civilization. This seemingly blind, apocalyptic wipe-out of falsehoods, is by no means a cynic’s revenge. There is also justice in it inasmuch as it is a movement of strength which aims to provoke amazement and dismay, but intends to go far beyond the simple-mindedness of shock, because it procures utopian dimensions of entirely new possibilities of existence. Then, at the end of this inevitable journey, the peace may come, but not before. It constitutes a celebration of power which despises pettiness and lullaby-lies, ripping them off of the foundations of the liars-world and exposing them afterwards, as a wave does with beach sand.
There is method and design in this visual calligraphy, and it strives to contain in itself all that is essential and elemental and to leave behind the remains of the unnecessary.
It carries out the magnitude of tragedy but also the subtleness and silver-lining of hope.