They say the fish is the last to discover water. An aquarium is a closed ecosystem whose inhabitants don’t know they live inside it and never think of leaving. Another Aquarium offers a second one, almost identical to ours. Almost.
Nik Hrovat W.’s new paintings are views into it. Each sets up a familiar world, complete and convincing, and then places inside it one thing that doesn’t belong. The artist has a word for this intruder: submersive, a cross between subversive and submerged. A plastic toy holds perfectly still while the people around it blur. Which of them is really here? A hero waits in front of nothing, beside a set we all know, from the wrong film. Who produces our images of hope? A crowd turns out to be a backdrop, or a backdrop a crowd. Whose scene is this?
The paintings explain nothing and mock nothing. They keep a straight face, and that is what unsettles. They don’t knock reality down. They loosen it, the way a tooth comes loose: once you have felt it give, your tongue keeps going back to it.
Look through the glass long enough, and you start to wonder which side of it you are on.