Nike Savvas Sparks

Stephen Little

Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

The forms used for these works arose from an association with a work from Savvas’ Sliding Ladder series, titled Sliding Ladder: yellow with blue pentagon (2012). Savvas stated “The dynamic optical experience this work affords the viewer coupled with its playful physical dimension, and its immersive luminous shooting rays of yellow wool invoked something primal and poetic within me, as though the sky were giving birth to a million suns. Traumatized and devastated as I was at the time by tragic news, I felt I had metaphysically flat-lined. I had become momentarily lost, and overwhelmed by the powerful and emblematic motif of an exploding Sun, a Sun without limits - a boundless experience that came to embody a deep cathartic release.”

The emblematic forms represent an ever-extending point of rendezvous where Savvas drew on mental imaging to create these works. Here, tangible space overlaps with optical space, flatness with perceived spatiality, seeing with sensing. This is a territory of loose association where the physical meets the meta-physical, where a blue bleed becomes something much less definable. Perhaps it is an iris, or a super cosmic dispersal, or something so small, fragmented, personal, subjective and poetic, that to deliberate on its original significance may be to entirely miss the point. There are Suns within Suns, ringed and contained with dense warm hues whose tones invoke slowly diminishing warmth. There are references to recent histories such as Joseph Alber’s colour studies and retro 70s chic. There are dizzying moirés, explosive rupturing molten suns, softly blown blue speckled hazes, and a desolate black-fingered Sun that mirrors its absent light.

Stephen Little
7th February 2014