Quotes

I asked friends, colleagues, artists I love, collectors and curators to write one or two sentences on my work.


Nicolas Grenier, artist 2017
For me, the color fields of glitter, combined with the objects, symbols, shapes and other entities that populate Nika's works and world don't come across as fictions, suggestions or representations; they seem to be the doors to an actual world.

Ivo Dimchev, performance Artist, 2017
I want to get inside a Nika’s painting, undress, have a long walk and have a very slow sex with the first person I meet there. Then I can simply die somewhere in the down right corner of the canvas.

Larry Tee Thom, Dj and designer at Tzuji 2017
At first glance, Nika's unique work hits you like candy; sweet pleasure. It's when you meditate on them that they grow into more complicated objects. The are gorgeous and mysterious.

Francois Dell'Aniello, collector 2017
What is impressive with Nika's artworks is that the immediate environment becomes an intricate part of the work, that The ambiant lighting plays and becomes one with them, enchanting the visitor

Gilles Neiens, curator at Insitu Berlin 2017
The series of glitter paintings are surrounded by a special energy, an auratic power and while looking at them again, even more intensively, they give you a glimpse of hope and belief in the possibility of human transformation in times full of crisis.

Martijn In’t Veld, writer, 2017
Everytime we mere mortals rub her stardust out of our eyes we are reminded that Nika is an endless cosmos of dreams and desires.

Harold Klunder, painter, 2017
Memory is a record of individual experience, looking at the ocean floor or the endless sky.
Harmony as structure, the teeming life of the ever changing luminous painted flat surface that defies convention.
As viewer I create the painting by moving back and forth and side to side to capture the wholeness of the paintings presence

Ulrich von Köstlin, collector, 2017
Nika’s paintings are happy paintings. Their glittering exterior and aesthetics open the heart and make it easy to enter. But there is depth behind, and the specific selection of images and symbolism in the concrete works, and the mood and emotion in the abstract works makes me go back repeatedly and become inquisitive about the work and my own thoughts.

Pepper Levain, photographer, 2017
Nikas paintings and objects to me feel like my therapist being thrown into a blender. Releasing my outspoken fears, my pleasures, my vivid dreams, intuitions and nightmares as well as thoughts on a very concrete subject, to then be abstracted, distorted and finally decorated with a glitter coat to become again representable and elegantly being spit back out into the world.

Dory Smith, writer C-Magazine, 2017
Marrying glitter, a kitschy crafting material, with glue Nike Fontaine creates dizzying bursts of visual energy. Fontaine's quick execution of these works, arriving out of necessity given the material’s quick drying time, captures the artists’ preparatory transcendental meditative state. Fontaine's play with the traditional medium of painting is unexpected gifting us something new and unexpected, giving birth to abstracted ghostly compositions; what could be seen as curtains, waves, or spiritual monuments. Described by Fontaine as “condensed universes in which one has to dive into”, I can’t help but find myself taken into the realm of the metaphysical when looking at her work. Taking in one of her paintings, the shimmering abstracted colourscapes, undulations, swirls, allow for a us to possibly awaken an oft dormant third eye.

Joyce Yahouda, galerist, 2017
When I discovered the work of Nika Fontaine, I was intrigued by this work which references the traditional criteria of art history, while introducing an element of kitsch and seems to situate itself somewhere between irony and the sublime.
I was confronted by kitsch, sparkling works, who question the idea of good versus bad taste, by works making references to abstract expressionism, such as those by Rothko or Barnett Newman, and by works whose playful characters reminded me of some graffiti works. And definitely I found the works emanate a certain elegance.

Jason McKechnie, Artist / Curator, 2017
I greatly admire Nika's work ethic, enthusiasm and vision the insight and restraint necessary to make work from a place of sincerity. Nika's are generous artworks for the viewer - they provide us with luxuriously pleasing long reads. They are vehicles for dreaming.

Sean Smuda, artist, 2019
Nika’s shimmering star structures welcome the voyage and voyager. In them, the Cosmos is manifest and invites our bodies to soar, contemplate, and realign with it. Take their energy where you will is the only law.

Benjamin Klein, artist and writer, 2019
Nika's works collide kitsch and spirituality together, erasing the boundaries between them without irony, in the hope that a form of transcendence will take place and become clear and accessible. Her art represents a defiant stance against embarrassment and shame with respect to supposedly respectable art norms, while creating a strongly personal form of beauty. This is the position Nika Fontaine has staked for herself, and is defending it by going on the attack.

Alex Leibner, gallerist,2019
Nika’s work is unique in that it comes to life in different ways for each viewer. It eludes documentation by photography and other attempts of capture. It is a time machine through which we can experience impermanence, serving as a reminder to live in the glittering moment of the present.