TEAM INCLUSIVE

About the meander

On the occasion of Nikolas Müller's diploma exhibition, January 31 - February 1, 2023, Academy of Media Arts Cologne

When the wet paint spreads across the paper, a whole world opens up. Nikolas Müller's artistic cosmos unfolds between coincidence and inspiration, letting go and holding on, wanting and being able. The clouds of colour are surrounded by lines that are constantly reconstituting themselves. The clouds are, too, in the process of becoming and still have to reach their final form. Instead of setting boundaries for the color fields, they embrace them. They organically fit together and into each other. Our gaze meanders along the bending, winding and enclosing lines and never tires of the rich play of colors, the back and forth between abstraction and figuration. Like the river that repeatedly overflows its bank (if it is lucky enough not to have been straightened out of capitalist interests), Müller also repeatedly overflows the borders between different shapes. Personal things are recorded and at the same time placed in relation to current discourses or daily politics. Ironic meets harsh reality. It's a constant back and forth — just like life itself.

The back and forth between the opposites can be seen in the two small formats of the so-called Triptych at the beginning of the presentation. Red and blue face each other in the two small-format watercolors. Monochrome formations in dark blue spread across the left sheet. Fraying clouds enclose the small ornamental structures in the center of the picture. Like a membrane, the colored pencil lines are held together by the flowing watercolor structures. The fine and delicate formations on the inside perhaps stand for inner states that create loops, curls and bows in secret, which eventually materialize or dissolve again. These feelings, thoughts and sensations are softly cushioned and protected from the outside world. The blue keeps to itself with its smoking, wafting and wandering about, but is not completely decoupled from the world due to the permeability of the color fields. The opposite picture is quite different. A hand is drawn in the strong signal color red. Does it mean to stop us or is it rather a desperate call to get in touch with the graphic? Like the footprints of children on the windows of day-care centers, the hand means to us, 'I've been here', 'I've worked here'. We are asked to reach out to the work of art, to enter into a relationship with it and the artist. The two hands in the lower half of the picture are almost like instructions. While the blue watercolor allows us to capture only a hint of the mystical ornaments, we have no choice but to connect our eyes with the red watercolor.

Between the unconditional desire to get in contact with the outside and the simultaneous claim to want to protect one's feelings from the world, a kind of warrior appears in the middle of the three-piece composition. Red and blue combine on the surface of his armor. In a combative pose, he faces us head-on. The left arm is missing a hand. Instead, all that can be seen is a stump on the damaged forearm, which makes the figure appear like a cyborg. A banner is held up in the right hand. On it, however, we look in vain for a combative statement. Instead, it can be found in the right-hand corner: ""I am not a runner"", it says soberly. It remains unclear whether this description is to be understood as an objective observation, since the warrior's legs appear to have been amputated below the knees and thus really bereft of any ability to walk. Or is this a much more profound statement: The way the world is going is so overwhelming that it is difficult to keep up. So who can blame the warrior depicted here for withdrawing into his protective armor and sticking his head not in the sand, but in his armour. In a world like ours, in which the unfolding events are so loud, there is perhaps no longer any need for belligerent statements to be trumpeted. The banner remains empty and the only resistance left is t