In these coordinates unfold the stages of transformation in contemporary art. The third decade of a far from tranquil twenty-first century has introduced unison sensations of overlapping creative intentions. Countless modes of establishing one’s participation in the relentless post-informational present are articulated as a vibrant opening of everything at once. Overlaps and perceptual adventures subordinated to digital certainties have long departed from consolatory images. And although enthusiasm and affective fulfillment appear as meaningful energetic nuclei of existence, the making of one’s own work arises within a world of risk, under conditions of disruption, at the most truthful crossroads of judgment upon the path already traversed. Fragmentation and the refuge of personal gardens — from the postmodern era into the turn of the century — have produced an almost encyclopedic range of visual representations. Hence contemporary art, particularly painting in all its manifestations, defines itself through the fervor of its own proofs. The construction of small-format images into a total presence becomes a differently realized or manifested existence. Such intentions are unmistakably present in the multiple painterly impulses of Nikolina Nikolić. Emerging from an unknowable matrix, the painted surfaces appear as segments of recognition. Contours, textures, reflections, accretions, and even portrait-like traces participate in constructing an imagined spatial architecture achieved through the sonority of painting within a personal flow of time — prepared for unification within the gallery condition. The exhibition space — the notion of purity and isolation of experience — the White Cube — for nearly four decades has inhabited a presentable unified world that brings art into being before the visitor’s arrival. It inherits nothing less than the principle of rendering intensity. Between apprehension, retreat before the unknown, and the ardor of discovery, the painter enters, through sustained concentration, into the construction of a diary as a spatial totality. The painterly gesture gathers into cumulative effects and biomorphic matrices of shadowed traces, vibrant contours, and chromatic simulations. Does the evoked painted matter testify to the real presence of tissue, texture, and evidence through which painting today fulfills itself within the condition “after history”? In successive and proximate moments of time across each formed whole, an emotional energetic concentration appears — the biological systole and diastole of existence itself. Image construction reaches toward the tumult and pictorial situation of possible uttered words or voices, concepts subordinated to and resolutely surrendered to the building of painterly verticality. A lattice-like, partially networked division occasionally occupying the entire composition suggests structure — a totality introducing flashes of vortex and a not unfounded wave of a world marked by damage and disturbance. Within the properties of Informel painting of the 1950s, the whirling traces inside materiality were not merely the unleashed expressive force of gesture or artists in crisis, but evidence of an indirect search for essentially indistinct lines of the world as it is. Such forms of searching within torn matter were not only reflections of immeasurable contingency: painters now of museum stature from those transformative years — Wols, Dubuffet, Burri, certainly Bacon, and sculptors such as Germaine Richier — positioned themselves at the very center of both visible and hidden ruptured becomings of their works as an unnamed will toward the essence of human trial. Within these incidental vortices that Nikolina Nikolić halts through her handwriting-like painterly mark — based on the temperamental vibrancy of recognition of the visible, lived, and subconscious worlds — lies an undertaking of release. Such visual experience of the world and emotional experience of life’s abundance form works that unite a personal gesture as a method of reflecting the will of a psychic substratum. The visible transfer — even the dominance of darkness or organic reds upon the surface — opens the production of experiential illusions, a play and exposure of one’s own position. An associative everyday of motifs, akin to rhythmic freshness, estrangement, and fear, embodies the inserted traces — for viewers of her paintings — of abstracted connective tissue of floating object associations. In the environmental construction of the exhibition space unfolds a struggle with dissonances, with personal experiences, perhaps equally with histories and myths — in truth with all that transmits the inheritance of art within our global and surrounding affinities. It seems that aesthetic experience and perceptual experience pause within these undefined, or within words and syllables embedded in the tissue of the image — indicated sections of transformation of both another’s and one’s own past. A sensed and transmitted flowing dynamics appears, akin to harmonic musical clusters passing through precisely those durations revealed in painted passages across the canvas surface. The reflection is condensed and may suggest organic calls of biomorphism. Expressive fervor leans toward a sensory influx of the perceived world arising from consonance and meditative concentration. Elements binding pigment and mass to the surface form a corporeal biological circulation. From them emerges an exaltation which, however subdued, conveys the energy of chromatic strokes and the testimony of the enigma of survival within contemporary existence. Nikola Suica