Nicolas Kuligowski

Nicolas Kuligowski's works present photo-and-graphic images that levitate from acrylic paint backgrounds that translate the rage to paint. At first glance, the representations do not seem to combine with the material from which they originate. The technique recalls Picasso and Matisse who disunite the colors of the figures supposed to marry them. It also refers to Richter and Polke who, by the same process, reinforce the optical depth of the painting by creating two planes of interpretation of the image. We also recognize the screen printing reinvented in plastic art by Andy Warhol. However, with Nicolas Kuligowski, the heritage of the masters is assimilated in a very personal way, where the dissonance of colors is reconciled with the harmony of the visual. For his images, the artist's technique, without being hyperrealistic, takes up the characteristics of photographic representation. The grain converts to acrylic point. The contrasts are of the order of the imprint, the suggestion of the form favors the detail. The image is not of the order of mimesis. The patterns are realistic but they suggest more than they bear witness to. They dissolve and tremble in the color where they are exposed and damaged at the same time. Nicolas Kuligowski's art manifests the vibration of reality in the form of a score where nuances and figures break free from resemblance and illusion to only expose the dynamics of the compositions, the intimate music of painting. One of the artist's challenges is then to harmoniously associate the background with the image. On the substrate, the painter poses, scrapes, smoothes, rubs, passes over the material, which seems organic, alive, a vibrating space which creates its own fiction. The impression is still strong when the chromatic masses prevent the eye from stopping its movement, where the light breaks down into incidences and where the detail vanishes in color. The composition then reflects the mobility of the gaze that contemplates it. Between content and form, the visual impact of the image goes beyond the frame, it invades the field of perception. The visual morphemes created by the evocative power of colors excite the eye to the point of animating imaginary shapes. The optical balance effect between the image and the background energizes the surface of the painting. The painting becomes this background whose breath literally lifts the image. From the palpitation of colors then rise the foreground and its effect of reality, like an immanent invention of the pictorial substance. Nicolas Kuligowski's art transfigures the image resulting from an optical process, photography, film, video, through matter. Thus, a new sensation close to sensual exchange is transmitted through aesthetic mirage. From the substance of the representation comes a fiction to which we lend the alibi of an imaginary story.