LAZAR NIKOLIĆ
Lazar Nikolić (b. 1996, Pirot) was born into a world that still lived the rhetorical form of the Middle Ages. He grew up with stories of Turkish sultans, Serbian kings, and Byzantine emperors. The magic of a past that was still present was all the more potent because in 1996, news of the death of God had already reached Pirot, like every conqueror, by way of the ancient Via Militaris. The polyphony of the many intersecting narrative layers accumulated in the Pirot valley resulted in a cacophony that stifled any teleology. It was precisely this situation that provided fertile ground for the penetration of positivistic rationality in Lazar's work, but with a strong attachment to the landscapes of cult art. In his work, he seeks to establish a balance between nihilism and teleology through a form of cult art placed in the context of contemporary artistic activity. The interweaving of numerous narrative layers in his work, the establishment of links between distant, contradictory phenomena, is nothing more than a transposed rhetorical form of a Roman mutation on the road to Constantinople that no longer exists.