bu John Austin
At the basis of Micko’s series of paintings, recently exhibited at Artifact, is the artist’s understanding of metamorphosis and mutability. This principle of linear flow and graphic black on black correlation is at the core of his carbon and acrylic on canvas paintings. It permeates all of his imagery, rendering it pliable and playfully while emphasizing the play of endless suggestibility. The artist has applied a set of aesthetic procedures such as addition, subtraction, layering, mark making, interweaving imagery to create diaphanous worlds, which stress the integration of parts to the whole as well as the reverse.
In Micko’s work shapes are referred to only in an approximate way. His linear structures seem to float and hover over the field. Their edges seem to waver and tremble like some manifold slapdash determinations that appear more buoyant and joyful than restrictive and polite. In these works, with their repeated and reflected imagery, the multiplicity theme and its place in contemporary identity formation seems to predominate.
To place oneself in front of one the artist’s paintings can be an unsettling experience: the structured surfaces of his works manage to convey both untethered energy and implacability. Micko’s paintings at Artifact hover uneasily between abstraction and geometry.
The artist writes in his statement: “The individual creative signature in my works strives for contemplatively and meditativeness through the constant of the universal order in diversity. My need to convey the foregoing relations in (almost) two-dimensional works is at the level of philosophical interpretation, whereby each work has its own story and opens a multitude of new dimensions. My most recent artistic production is practical research with the carbon black (the blackest known black) – a color discovered by the newest nanotechnology that gives us an insight into what is beyond black.”
John Austin is an art writer living and working in Manhattan