THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE PAST : A Personal Account by Eugenio Viola
Detail of Hyperkulturemia installation at The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2018-2019, photograph by Bo Wong, c/o The Art Gallery of Western Australia
'“Whenever we are before the image, we are before time.”
Georges Didi-Huberman [1]
I had the privilege of meeting Andrew Nicholls when I moved to Perth in 2016. There, I was able to discover his enchanting and deliberately anachronistic poetics. Nicholls takes his inspiration from literature, art history, and contemporary culture. He constructs narratives of erotic exploration that sometimes suggest themselves as metaphors for a sexual and sensual awakening.
Nicholls’ artistic research is cultured, exemplary, and obsessively made. It includes many motifs, compositions, and emotions from the Western art historical canon: the Renaissance’s allegory, the sumptuous Baroque, and the bloodless Art Nouveau. Even his use of drawing is as it was conceived by the ancient masters of the Renaissance Age: a critical tool to investigate and question reality. Therefore, we could speak about his work in terms of “anachronism” or “citationism,” even if the most appropriate definition would be to consider Nicholls as an art historian: centuries of art reverberate from his enigmatic drawings.
Probably due to my origins, I see his work succumb to what historian Robert Aldrich has called “the seduction of the Mediterranean,” a mythic construct of Southern Italy that was a central theme in homoerotic art and literature from the 1750s to the 1950s.[2] For such figures as Lord Byron, John Addington Symonds, A.E. Housman, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster, to name just a few, Italy, and particularly the South, represented the joining of aesthetics and eroticism: “For those in the cultured classes, homosexuality was literature and art; sex was transformed into an aesthetic act.”[3] They “delved into classical mythology and history for figures, such as Ganymede, Antinous, Achilles, and Patroclus, through which they could portray a sexuality”. I believe Nicholls follows this glorious tradition with his vivid, erotically charged work. It is evident, for example, in the drawings, photographs, and ceramics of Hyperkulturemia, (Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2018-2019).
The persistent reference to the Arcadian tradition (et in Arcadia ego) is another focal point of Nicholls’ work. It identifies a specific sensitivity that intercepts a long tradition of gay artists whose artistic research has appropriated classical-Arcadian motifs transposed into idyllic settings populated by young ephebes posing in classic postures and scenes: from Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden to Paul Cadmus, James Bidgood, Pierre and Gilles, David Lachapelle, Hernan Bas, Paul P, to name a few.
The alluring male protagonists of his oneiric visions are usually portrayed in articulate compositions that often reach the scale and the ambition of the ancient fresco cycles. Whether confined to the intimacy of a genre scene or lost in the vertigo of a dense, lush, romantic landscape, they inhabit a fantasised world of eroticism and sensuality. With a sophisticated touch, Nicholls revisits and reinterprets genres and motifs of classical painting from a homoerotic perspective that is seemingly melancholic.
Captured at various thresholds – between innocence and eroticism, public and private realms – and situated within a shifting terrain of interior and exterior spaces, the protagonists of Nicholls’ pantheon are selected from his friends and artist peers. I am also portrayed in one of his works (The Last Judgement, 2016-18). I still remember when I posed for him. It was the first time I visited his studio. I didn’t know that I would end up immortalised as a contemporary version of a saint who was beheaded and, quoting the Christian iconography, offers his head on a plate to the viewer. Bringing to mind poles of intellect and physicality, the male protagonists of his monumental drawn frescos engage in courtship, love, and death rituals that seem to be based on a theatrical exaggeration of gestures and emotions.
Georges Didi-Huberman has consistently argued for the positivity of anachronism as a methodology able to analyse and understand the history of art,[4] “Before the image, however old it may be, the present never ceases to reshape, provided that the dispossession of the gaze has not entirely given way to the vain complacency of the ‘specialist’. Before an image, however recent, however contemporary it may be, the past never ceases to reshape, since this image only becomes thinkable in a construction of memory, if not of the obsession. Before an image, finally, we have to humbly recognise this fact: that it will probably outlive us, that before it we are the fragile element, the transient element, and that before us it is the element of the future, the element of permanence. The image often has more memory and more future than the being who contemplates it”.[5]
In this way, the past becomes present again. Nicholls’ choice to re-propose the ideal of beauty and harmony testifies its incorruptible value over time, a kind of never-ending classicism. However, his intention is not to elicit a nostalgic longing for the past. Instead, he aims to propose an argument for classical ideals into the discourse of contemporary artistic practices and values. His work offers an alternative to the discord and strife of the present cacophonous era. Rather than turning away from today’s relentless chaos, nihilism, violence, and rhetorical conformity, Nicholls faces the situation head-on. He produces an art of clarity and balance that is enchanting in its silence and serenity while demonstrating the most provocative act: how the enchantment of the past can critically deal with our contemporary age.
Eugenio Viola, 2022
Eugenio Viola, Ph.D., is the current Chief Curator of the Bogota Modern Art Museum - MAMBO. From 2017 to 2019, he was Senior Curator at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts - PICA, in Western Australia. From 2009 to 2016, he was Curator at MADRE, the Contemporary Art Museum of Naples, Italy. He is the Curator of the Estonian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and the Italian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. www.eugenioviola.com
1. Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of the Anachronism’, in Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds, Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, 2003, p 31. It is the translated introduction from Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: History de l’arte et anachronisme des images, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 2000.
2. Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. Routledge, London, 1993.
3. Ibid., 222.
4. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, op. cit.
5. Didi-Huberman, ‘Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of the Anachronism’, in Farago and Zwijenberg, eds, Compelling Visuality, op. cit. p 33.