Plein feux
Patrick Javault invites Stefan Nikolaev, artist and Emile Ouroumov, art critic and curator, on the occasion of the launch of the artist’s monograph, One for the Money, Two for the Show.
From a monumental luxury lighter to a giant cigarette pack upright like a stele or horizontal as a stone slab, from Marlboro boxes to an altered “no smoking” sign, tobacco is a major source of inspiration for Stefan Nikolaev. The artist’s thinking is evidently stimulated by the subject: the sources of creation, the dreams peddled by advertising, the appeal of nothingness, the brevity of existence, but also the consumable itself, with the idea of freedom and the taste for transgression it conveys. In fact, Nikolaev’s grand project is to charter a transatlantic flight reserved exclusively for smokers.
More generally, Nikolaev also likes to make light of categories, mixing pop with the conceptual or playing on words to bring unexpected responses to the themes of international exhibitions inviting him.
He can for instance rewrite history, comparing the statue of a Bulgarian hero to that of a Swiss hero, or confront the individualism of Western contemporary art with the emphasis on artistic productivity encouraged in his native country, Bulgaria.
On the cover of the monograph published by Les Presses du Réel, One Money – Two Show, a statement reads, I hate America and America hates me. It is a sculpture in which Chuck Jones’s coyote is decked with the blanket and the cane used by Beuys in his famous 1974 action, which bore the opposite title (“I Like America and America Likes Me”). The rewriting of a message of love into a message of hatred and the substitution of an icon of popular American culture for the unsettling figure of the artist as shaman constitute an apt introduction to Nikolaev’s oblique strategies. We will discuss these and other topics with the artist himself and art critic (and supporter) Emile Ouroumov.
