Emocije

Ana Vitanova-Ringaceva

Оrbis Terrarum
A view of Nikola Smilkov’s world of sculpture

No one has ever blamed anyone

for falling in love with the serenity of stone.

„Stone“ – Ante Popovski

Nikola Smilkov's sculptures give Macedonian art yet another strong argument for why it should be serene, even while it rejoices under the lights of world art galleries. Smilkov's sculptures have their place in space and time and their own artistic semiology, creating a pure semiotic field around them. Each sculpture is a semiotic sign, strongly metaphorically positioned. The original artistic concept has created an original artistic expression, the imo pectore (from the innermost depths) of the sculptor himself. An emotion created from the earth, torn from our ontological nature of mortals, standing before life as a way station on an eternal journey, an eternal movement.

Placed in the enclosed space of the gallery, each one placed on a personal pedestal, it seems to have fenced off a space for itself. And yet, all together, as if breathing in one life rhythm. It is fascinating to realize that the stone has been stripped of its harshness and coldness, that sharp corners have been given a gentle softness, that emotion has been given the most beautiful form, whatever we call it: love, tenderness, longing, sadness, loneliness.... A certain sense of balance hovers around the sculptures of Nikola Smilkov, calm in restlessness, rest in unrest, life out from the lifeless. To reach for the stone and to distill an emotion from its lifelessness is an act of defiance. The earth - the cold embrace for the fragile human body- is recreated by the artist with his touch into a new life, completely melting into the concept of the eternal circulation of matter. The hand, the emotion and the earth as spiritus agens for the creative mission of Nikola Smilkov, in symbiosis create a special poetics of sculpture. Smilkov mentally creates in the interspace of the aesthetic; with the feat of his hand he gives form to the emotion, in order to offer it to the world as pure essence. With the movements of his hands, the artist ennobles the stone, creating anthropomorphized figures with their own character and soul. It is as if he wants to give each of his forms a personal identity. The movements caught in their own dramaticness give the impression of a complete overlap of form and content. Smooth molded surfaces, a longing toward perfection – the eternal yearning of a transient and perishable world.

On the high pedestals stand the sculptures sculpted with a modern aesthetic expression, but positioned in the universal dimension of existence. “Fervor“, “Anticipation“, “Longing“, “Remembrance“, “Awakening“, “Melancholy“ are only forms of an ephemeral existence, but recreated in stone, clay, marble, or bronze, to the eye of the beholder they are petrified emotions with a strong reflective energy. Our eyes of naive observers absorb the minimalist figures as imprints of a large and chaotic world. And in all that chaos, the man pauses, to stop, to look at them in passing. They are calm, each in their own safe space. And these are not specific characters from the artist's life; these are universal human destinies sunk into an abyss or raised on a pedestal. Here the man is conceited in his own greatness and

dominance, but in essence he is so small, fragile and brittle. The feeling is inevitable that, upon touching the sculpture, it would melt under the heat of the palm, disappear, merge into the blood and become an emotion. Through sculpture, Smilkov actually expresses himself and his own worldview, but also so much more than that. An artist of such a profile opens up to the world through sculpture, as if cutting his chest in two in order to give the world what he silently yearns for. The world today and the little man thrown into it are hungry and thirsty for love, for touch, for hugs, for understanding, for listening.

A quiet lyrical melancholy emanates from each of the sculptures, an aura of unforced tranquility, a sense of anticipation that at any moment the sculpture would start speaking or that it and the observer understand each other without words. And the observer, on the other hand, seems to recognize an interlocutor in the petrified rectangular face sitting half-hunched, thoughtfully waiting. Such subtlety in expression renders the figures mystical, arrogantly placed on pedestals under gallery lights. We have the right to imagine that when the lights are out, the figures wake up, raise their heads, raise their crossed legs, and dance in the gallery emptied of human gazes. In Smilkov's sculptural stories, two narratives seem to flow, one deeply personal, told by the artist in the first person, and the other, that of the collective. The collective and its social struggles are unavoidable themes in the sculptor's aesthetics. He knows how to sublimate the emotion of the collective in a work that will speak much louder than all the stories told and retold.

Nikola Smilkov has been building his sculptural identity for years. He seems to be constantly nurturing, growing, and caring for his works, just as one loves and cares for a child. It seems to us that his sculptures are created after some personally experienced dialogues that take place in the inner world of the artist. After such spiritual sessions of self-discovery, the hand reaches out to create a replica of the sensory world, to objectify it. The man in the sculptures of the sculptor emerges through his beauty, passion, mystery, pride, fragility, hesitation, yearning, rationality, dignity. The artist is in constant search for all the faces of the existential drama of man. His works are universally positioned towards the world and are therefore easily understood by art lovers everywhere. If the artist aspires to the sublime, with a lurking desire to outsmart the earthly in order to rise to the infinite, then the sculptor is closest to realizing that eternal yearning.