Pedro Cuperman: This show is really important for our gallery and for me, among other things, because it’s an experiment with the tradition of painting and the tradition or printing, and with you, as an exponent within a contemporary context of those two traditions. When we started talking about this show, I think you brought to the conversation the name of Jorge Luis Borges and the concept of the labyrinth, and after we talked and decided to organize the show, I did my research and realized in looking at your work and thinking about that reference to Borges and the labyrinth, that your work is constructed around an external reference. In the case of the labyrinth, it’s a symbolic element and quite obvious. In the case of Borges, it becomes a concrete kind of quotation. But looking at your work I realize that it’s more than that; that there is some sort of dialogical experiment. I wonder if most of your experimental work could be called a collaborative experience in the sense that it is always a work which is relating to another work. I don’t know if you can make sense of any of this.

Nick Kraczyna: Very definitely. You are right and my work depends a lot on the outside. The art of making an image is definitely related to various other works of art, other creations, visual or literary. My fascination with the labyrinth is because it’s an incredible symbol and I identify with the symbol. I identify with Icarus, who was imprisoned in a labyrinth not because of his doing but because of his father’s doing. The interesting thing is that Daedalus created a labyrinth, which then imprisons him. I see the labyrinth as the society that we create, which then imprisons us. We all want to fly out of this labyrinth, like Icarus. I don’t think that he defied his father, Daedalus, as is often implied by many. This wasn’t so much an act of disobedience. Icarus became fascinated with the joy of flying. The pursuit of this flight that he indulged is one of joy, not disobedience. He was flying higher and higher, soaring, as he felt delighted in the beauty and pleasure of soaring.

PC: That’s beautiful and a great answer that really expands on the symbolism, yes? And in a way it connects with the dilemmas of our society. But I am interested also in the notion of collaboration, which is the starting point of your work; the creative process. The other can become an enticement, the point of departure, and I notice that there is a whole surrealist element in you that could be referred to as dream, motivation, which allows for the spontaneous expansion or absorption into the other’s work or into some internal symbolism or internal mythology that you share, because we shouldn’t forget that you come from a part of the world which has a specific mythology. So my real interest is, in that sense, I will try to be more precise, that you share two contradictory walls: On one hand you are a person who is really searching for mechanisms of expression on the outside and even if that mechanism comes in a dream, it’s still outside. At the same time, you are a printer and the type of work you do has all the characteristics of the artesanal aspect of the Renaissance man. On one hand you are a contemporary person and on the other hand, the way you work, the way you calculate your work has all the treasures of the Renaissance. So could we say that this contradiction and this poetic confrontation is perhaps a mark of your work, or am I trying to force this onto you?

NK: Such a contradiction does exist in me. I live in contrast. And I believe most people live in contrast, in opposite poles that exist within us. I don’t want to fall into banal descriptions, like good and evil, which exist within us, but at various points, it’s like I’m very much interested in my own subconscious that manifests itself through the mirror concept of the actual dream, because in our dream state, we are more real. In society we put on a mask.

PC: Is that why you use in your work what one could read in pictorial terms as sort of abstractions? I mean, images that are so desperately trying to become real that they don’t reach; they don’t go beyond… and so they have masks or they are inaccessible, and the viewer must project into them. Is that a mark in your work?

NK: Yes. Since I’m very interested in the mirror state, where in dreams things transform all the time into something else or somebody else, so it’s forever changing from one thing into another and that’s why my drawings don’t want to be very concrete and defined. In the act of living and therefore in the act of creating, in my craft, I am interested in the process rather than in final results.

PC: So… let me be the devil’s advocate. When we were talking before, you showed me the cover of a chess magazine that had a tribute to Marcel Duchamp. I think one of the interesting things of post Duchamp times is the kind of humor that is introduced; the distance, yes? I sense in your work, again, a kind of existential commitment to yourself and yet, at the same time, a distance. I don’t know if you have formulated yourself this idea in this way, but I think distance in you is not humor; it’s technique. You become an old fashioned, traditional Renaissance person, using a very old technique to produce a very contemporary visual image. So in between those two is humor, humor as drama… and what I’m getting at is, what does your work represent? And I will ask if you think it represents this dilemma of the contemporary artist, between what Borges calls algebra and fire; high quality traditional work and total explosion. I hope I’m not being too…

NK: No! You’re not being much a devil’s advocate because you’re stating, presenting facts that I totally agree with. I love jokes, secret jokes, secret comments, and that’s why I love Borges because he makes citations of a citation that he has invented in one of his previous works. So in my work, there are always citations of another visual work of art, my own or the work of another artist, past and present, but  mostly artists of the past.

PC: Now if you would like, the reference is somebody else. That’s somehow very Borges… “Oh no…not me, that’s somebody else.”

NK: You see, the fact that I decided to live in Florence coming from my formation in the abstract expressionism in the United States, going to Florence, discovering the Renaissance and then deciding to live in Florence, is just what you were talking about the craftsmanship, the Renaissance within me to have and to keep, which allows me to then express… but you see, I have to be a master of the technique. So I take the technique, and printmaking is one of the art forms—aside from computer art—that is extremely technical. You have to preplan everything. You have to understand the technique in all its minute nuances.

PC: The algebra.

NK: Yes, the complication of it. And then get involved with it and work within that, and break all of those rules and regulation because you understand them so well. This is what allows me to explore, through the technique, to go through new doors, explore these things. I like to make a grid, and that is why I am interested in chessboards and labyrinths, which are geometric structures, and within this geometry I have all this organic human elements bursting from within the labyrinth. This contrast of the two worlds: the geometric world, created by man, imposed on his own society, and the natural organic quality of mankind.

PC: Ok, now, in this show, we are going a step further, because if I am right so far, there are two partners: you and the referent, yes? Here we have a third partner, the viewer, because by doing an installation, the way we are formulating it, the viewer of the participatory moment of that art becomes part of the art itself, or is it, you think, just a passive “take it or leave it?”

NK: I want people to enter my work. This why when I was doing these labyrinths, which started with…. But then it transformed with the abduction and the killing of Aldo Moro in Italy. The labyrinth, which is a symbol of our society, I made with mirrors, because I want the viewer to see himself or herself within my picture. That’s why I constructed using mirrors that engage the person to enter in. When you are looking at an image that is flat, you can take it or leave it, but if you have a mirror inside that image, your slightest movement will attract, because it creates movement within the picture. It attracts you. You have to go inside. Also in the mirror, you are looking not at the surface, but into the surface, the same equidistance that you are from that surface, so it becomes engaging. You enter inside. That’s the idea of making these labyrinths, just that. So now we’re taking a step further and creating a physical labyrinth with mirrors, in which you walk in and then be forced to follow a certain pattern, and then you come across my images, which one of them I brought back from Florence, has an actual mirror, where you see yourself inside that image.

PC: It is very interesting, when I spoke with you and started to think about this show… your work is exactly a metaphor of what Point of Contact is, because not only do you do printing and reference to the other to the point where you practically deny yourself by going outside, but you are also literary. You write. Your work sometimes is accompanied by texts, which of course one could read in terms of the 1960’s, in terms of content, but in terms of the experience of the event, again, it’s a collaborative work not only between a person and another person; not only between a person and a symbol, the symbol is the labyrinth, the person is the subservience… but between one medium and the other, that is, painting, printing and writing, so would you say that your work reaches this level of collaboration as it integrates modalities in all the aspects of the creative process?

NK: Well, I, for me… I love…  I love the use of the word love. I love to take an idea from mythology…

PC: You’re using it as an enticement.

NK: I depend on that, because that already has a life of its own and has touched many different minds and people throughout time, so I want to use that element.

PC: So why do we need to touch people?

NK: Oh, we’re tactile animals. We need to touch each other.

PC: Why? Why do we need touch? What do you mean, sensually touch?
Do you think art is a sensual dialogue?

NK: It’s a dialogue of the senses. But for me, just to present texture and organize it an aesthetic manner is not enough. For me the brain has to also be touched somehow.

PC: This is the last point I wanted to bring, which is the brain as a labyrinth too, yes? Because, well, for this show, I mean, I was trying to do research for this conversation and I realized that you are a brainy, sensitive person.

NK: I like to think I am both!

PC: You are both! You are brainy but at the same time you are rainy. It’s a brain that doesn’t go down the drain. It keeps well in a physical way. Is anyone that reads this catalogue, this conversation, going to have an image of what you are and what your show is all about?

NK: Well, they say that people hear only what they want to hear. The people who are already in tune will get it. The people who are out of tune maybe not.

PC: So can we tune them in?

NK: I hope so.

Exhibit runs April 3 through June 20, 2008
Opening reception with the artist: April 3rd at 6:30pm
Special Th3 event with artist in attendance: April 17, 5pm to 8pm
Free Admission / Open to the public

 

 

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