Runaways

THE SPHINX’S RIDDLE

There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes – and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths,’ and consequently there is no truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Nikola’s sphinxes have truly began to see. As soon as they opened their eyes and realised their condition, they decided to flee, put an end to their thousands of years long immobility and take off into the unknown, one after the other, in a wondrous herd. Their departure may be a final riddle they have left behind as testament. Perhaps, you never know with sphinxes, and, anyhow, the final truth is always already slipping out of our reach. Egyptian sphinxes, the sculptor explains, they should be benevolent. Unless they are bored with that, and are now resolute to make a complete break with their mythological definiteness. It seems to me that they are. They are letting us know: Don’t know about you, but I’m leavin’; Better half than dead. The expectation of a certain appearance bores them too. Retained are the cat-like suppleness, the pleasure of stretching, but we will no longer find here the exoticness and gaudiness of the pharaonic ancestors. In their eroded skin only the movement, the energy, the essence of their physical appearance have been preserved, but stripped of the recognisable detail that once adorned and determined their physiognomy. Besides, Nikola never anchors his irony in the literal. Therefore the myth is confronted with trenchant humour. The author, as always, subversively inverts the paradigm. The sphinxes renounce their conventional static position as guardians and, with it, they lose also the erotic potential that was present in the symbolic period. Through open mythological association, the sphinxes are joined by a unicorn, as well as a unicorn’s head. This bulky, unexpected Trophy, may be the embodiment of the riddle the Sphinxes have thrown in front of the viewer. Or it could be a beheading of previous (personal, artistic) ideals. Or, again, a caustic and indirect commentary on the banality of the quotidian. The Trophy’s destiny has already been decided, by the following sculpture, it will dematerialise into a skull, bluntly titled Bone. Nikola Vrljić’s sculptures resist a straightforward, uncomplicated reading of form and content. Back when I first wrote about the sculptures of Nikola Vrljić, writing about his bestiary, that is his humanlike animals, I referred to the ease of the fluid multiplicity of meaning of the sculptures as a sphinx’s riddle. And, indeed, the riddle has finally found its full concrete form. The recurrent fusion of human and animal attributes and character, through various works, has emerged as one of the distinctive features of author’s style, but also a stepping off point for continuous escapades and opening of possibilities into new variations of form and content. In this series we can note two interesting variations. The first is fragmentariness, already present in some of the earlier works (the piece Absence from 2014, a plinth with feet cut off at the ankles). This approach was first introduced

into modern sculpture, as a result of his experience of the ancient Greek and Roman fragments, by Auguste Rodin. The French sculptor has inaugurated the fragment as concentrating on the essence. The void represents, therefore, a discarding of the superfluous and a potential for dialogue with the viewer, who supplements the lack of form with his or her own imagination and interpretation. In addition, every fragment is a seed, a premonition of a work to come, in other words the logical vibrant growth of the series. The second variation, a new step, is the already mentioned abandonment of the descriptive quality, which allows for ever further freeing of form and its surface. The dynamic erosion of the epidermis, especially joined with fragmentariness, enhances the development of the author’s voice which is steadily gaining in expressivity. Even though essentially figurative, the sculptor succeeds in freeing his work of unnecessary detail, through that process letting himself up to pure sculptural intuition. That intuition, at times, includes citation of the predecessors. The piece of felt included in the fragmentary sphinx Better half than dead, evokes the personal mythology of Joseph Beuys, but also Rodin’s experiments with different materials. Still, I am inclined to believe that even this clue might be a step in the wrong direction. Each viewer will, after all, find his or her own truth and his or her own idea of the runaway Sphinxes.
-Barbara Vujanović

The Runaways were exhibited in:
Josip Račić Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, Croatia in 2018
Krsto Hegedušić Gallery, Petrinja, Croatia in 2017
Museum of the town of Kaštela, Croatia in 2017