Collages 2020-2022 by Nico Krijno

“The collages are made from re-photographed old images, which I have collected over the years. Each image featured is important to my process and research and references previous work that I have created. I made small prints and placed these on my scanner, exposing them to the beam under a black cloth by moving different images around on the flatbed. It is very satisfying as it usually takes me 10 painstaking tripod plates to create a single image.”

Yet for all of this, the book, of which Collages 2020-22 is the latest and most generous, feels a necessary endeavour. When seen in this way, en masse yet contained, it is arguably when we can best understand Krijno. Here we can understand the gravity of performance and process; understand how his work is always more than the sum of its parts; understand how he drifts in one direction to unravel new forms and ideas before returning to a more familiar albeit now different path.

And we can understand that for all the similarities his work has with unbridled play, there is something more pointed, more intentional; a kind of persistence and eagerness to exhaust all possibilities that does not exist in the wholly innocent play of a child. Seen in an exhibition or online, one fragmented and the other truly endless, these characteristics and intentions feel more hidden, less tangible. It could be said then that Collages 2020-22 is necessary on two fronts. First, as a way to better understand Krijno, and second, as a way to hold onto something that otherwise is inevitably fleeting.