Nina Pops sent me, this week, several photos of new work. The geometric forms are still evident, various and complicated and as simple as forms in the context of other forms can be. New is the cutout. Nina has put knife to paper, augmenting and subtracting from what she has done with pencils and paper.
“I want to move beyond the surface,” she wrote. “Emptiness. The void. Cutout. But still with the forms. The odyssey continues.”
These new works cast shadows. Interior shadows. They feature lines without color. The pressure of a sharp blade competes with the rasp of a sharp pencil. The paper takes on color and responds with texture to the pencil. It falls away under the knife.
The cutouts are surprising for a viewer expecting new variations of the twodimensional sort.
And yet they are not too surprising. The departure from the surface is slight, intimate, more a hint than an proclamation.
The new, third dimension doesnʼt raise the question of “or.” It asks, rather, the question of “and.”
The paper. The pencil. And the knife.
Itʼs a ménages à trois more dangerous than the familiar pas de deux, and in its new delicacy (the cut paper!) it is powerful.
Scott Abbott
Nina Pops spricht uns auf besondere Art an: in einer Sprache mit introspektivem Vokabular, eigener Syntax, Grammatik und Morphologie. Die Cut Outs sind die Zeichen einer einmaligen Schrift, in der die Künstlerin ihre Tagebücher der laufenden Erlebnisse niederschreibt. Es entsteht ein neuer Text, der eigentlich eine Übersetzung in eine andere Sprache ist, die aus einfachsten Worten - minimalistischen Zügen des Bleistifts, Farbstifts oder Skalpells - besteht. Die Tagebücher (die Cut Outs) von Nina Pops lassen uns so das schon Wohlbekannte in einer neuen Weise erleben.
Žarko Radaković, Schriftsteller und Übersetzer