Nights in Florence
Towards the end of the 1800s, John Ruskin described an oleographic Florence, immobile on the backdrop of a medieval word, an obligatory destination of the cultured as well as less-educated travelers of the Grand Tour. In order to escape from the suffocating presence of tourists (largely British) who were already pressing upon the cityscape in the 1870s, Ruskin navigates the city in the fresh hours of the morning in search of the right light for his watercolors and the silence necessary for the meditation of Florence’s immortal works of art and architecture. And the city, in the collective mindset of the entire world, is the same to this day; it has always been and will forever be white and ocher, like the limpid skies of Mornings in Florence, sunny, firm in its monumental fixity.
Nicolas H Muller seems to incarnate the idea of an updated version of the northern European traveler in Italy. His wandering attitude suggests that he has explored Florence by night, his movements are almost careless in a spontaneous and natural way, and he is attracted by the openings manifested in the surfaces of the city. Below surface, the artist barely glimpses the un-narrated, the removed, the trigger of an un-served vision. Nicolas’ rapport with art history reveals the same nonchalance and manifests a form of sardonic irreverence towards the bigoted deference attributed to icons – icons that have been transformed by merchandising into “one fits all” souvenir for the eidetic memory of the traveler who recognizes places by identifying
them through the images that have become their symbol.
And thus Nicolas navigates the monumental city of Florence – a city so completely flattened by its own history that its perception is cut out of contemporary history and he scrapes away at its surface to see what lies beneath. This attitude provides a tool to focalize the paradigm of his work, which is attested by the continuous action of going beyond the surface without descending too profoundly. On the other hand, cities and places (and in a certain sense, people), almost never preserve their true nature in profundity. Deep down, in the most hidden dimension of things, differences tend to even out due to a form of entropic compensation. Precisely like
how molecular simplification reduces the sense of superstructures to zero.
Nicolas, instead, seeks out casual truths just beneath the cosmetic surface of reality, and stumbles upon original discoveries by chance. His description of the world (the precise portion of the world that temporarily hosts him) advances with setbacks, displacements, subtraction of common elements, and the overturning of functions.
The bits and pieces he collects and brings back to his studio are like the postcards of a city that tautologically represent themselves, yet they become a revelatory tool that weighs upon a logical leap. Muller’s work almost always features discarded items or materials that were intended to be merely transitory – camouflaged to the gaze of the tourist, camouflage-inducing themselves, studied in order to camouflage other surfaces. The PVC canvas that absurdly (this absurdity becomes astounding only upon the de-contextualization of the object) reproduces the wall of the building below in order to hide and protect a restoration site, it is the symbol of this mystification of reality. Borrowed, placed on a frame, and shifted into exposition, the work becomes a demonstrative act also because Nicolas hangs the extremely composed painting on
a wall that is insincere as it is simply a plaster “plug” placed to subdivide a space. The overlapping of these dissimulations, like a Borges-esque pretense, contains perhaps a trigger or a solicitation for clarity from the public. Or perhaps no, given that the double camouflage is not declared in any way. The key to interpretation is nearby in the form of another object collected from the street, a sheet of glass on which a marker has traced the forms of Botticelli’s revealed Truth of the Calumny of Apelles. The glass, leaned against the wall, projects its shadows and those of the drawing, an evanescent simulacrum of another simulacrum.
What doesn’t escape us is the implicit sense within this representation of our permanence. This sense becomes clearer in another work that, in the gallery and in the abstract intent of the artist, is strategically located just beyond the gallery space and almost separately as if it was foreseen that the search for reality beneath the surface has a need for motivated explorers. A layer of white is spread on two small canvases that are saturated with color (unimportant exercises for pupil artists) to allow for their reuse. Upon this pasty surface, Nicolas traces small furrows to occasionally reveal the underlying design. In this manner, his ties to the people and spaces surrounding him are celebrated. Ties that are in a certain way sentimental, and through the watermark of this final adjective are observed all of Nicolas’ works from a different perspective.
All of the pieces (PVC, glass, scaffolding tube taken from a building site and used to illustrate upon the walls of another room like a katana sword or laser pen) are the souvenirs glued to the pages of a travel diary. There are the sensitive data of the artist’s relationship with the world that he explores, and when elected to an art status they become slides for the memory, not to mention a delineation, ultimately, of his (self) portrait. As a young man.
Pietro Gaglianò
Nicolas H Muller 