nino tsiklauri
vignettes
Painting and site-specific installation, 2023
About the Artist
I work in painting and drawing, mainly on unstretched large-scale taffeta to create site-specific installations. My work is heavily influenced by abstract expressionism, symbolism, naïve art, and color field paintings. I use oil pastels, ink, acrylic paint, and a variety of mediums to work the materials on the surface of taffeta, as well as hand-made tools for mark-making. I paint figures and landscapes in a non-traditional way. The final image is interchangeable between the background and the foreground.
My paintings are processed based, meditative, and action driven. Even though I work on large-scale paintings, I am interested in a scale shift and how it can change the makers’ and viewers’ experiences. Recently, I have been exploring small paintings on taffeta, stretched on arched-shaped frames. The arches restrain the figure but provide a portal for the viewer.
In my recent paintings, figure is used as a motif and as a symbol. It is in a desiderium. It stands for an ardent longing. It recalls a human form with narrow, intrusive, gesticulating arms and becomes an allegory of my body and its ability to twist in a similar manner. It inhabits an imaginative place--a collection of landscape photographs, layered through drawing and mark-making.
