PAINTINGS FROM BEHIND TIME

Lacking the vivid chroma, the experimental exuberance, the quest to explore unchartered waters - the sheer joie de vivre - of the earlier works, Nikolov's latest painting (succeeding a brief flirtation with avant-garde conceptualism and a failed attempt to break into Hollywood) is as cold as a tomb. Gone are the Spring palette of youth and soaring expressionism that characterized the best of the incunabula, the latest work, now heavily mannered and monumental in scale, is as insular, vacuous and lonely as the universe itself.

Monotonous, brooding and, quite frankly, macabre, it embraces the hopelessness of existence with silent, elegiac resignation; the mature work of an artist who seems to have concluded that he himself is the only alien lurking in the vast, empty darkness of the cosmos. And this may be to say, it is perhaps his greatest work. Indeed, ”in space no one can hear you scream."

- Derec Intus