0. ZAPP 29 RIGHT SIZE 10.25.16 SPREADS 2.12.17

Flying Machines and Musical Instruments by Adrian Nivola were shown in August at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY.
Homage to Sumter Battey, 2014, Adrian Nivola.
Flyer for a Retired Samurai, 2014, Adrian Nivola.
Two Flying Machines, Adrian Nivola.
From “Disparates: A Way of Flying” (Modo de volar) by Franciso Goya after 1812.
Goya is the first to illustrate in his paintings the dubious nature of action when action is no longer determined by a fixed,
transcendental moral code. In a world that had lost its former stability based on revealed religion, he and his contemporaries
had only reason and instinct left. Both proved to be unreliable instruments for navigation in a new era bedeviled by
enigmas, vague menaces, and the very concrete horrors of the Napoleonic Wars.
In a “Way of Flying” (Modo de Volar) men wearing birdlike headdresses and sporting hugh wings are seen in flight. There
is no horizon line, no way of telling up from down, and most important of all, there is no indication of Goya’s (and by implication,
our own) point of vantage. This divorce from any kind of ground is a constant in the “Disparates,” for even those
plates that do not levitate in pure air are devoid of any indication of locale or ground plane.
Yet for all their distortion of normal experience, there is nothing artificial about these visions. To call them dream images
short-circuits the issue. For even in dreams we experience gravity and register sensory experience. Some part of our being
resonates to the menace and the loneliness of the “Disparates.” Clinical psychology might at some future date help in the
interpretation of this haunting series of pictures. But their real meaning, one is willing to believe, will forever lie beyond
the grasp of even the most refined scientific examination. Psychiatry, after all, tries to resolve distraught and incongruous
situations. The “Disparates,” however, are the quintessence of that part of our life that forever defies understanding.
Fred Licht – “Goya, the Origins of the Modern Temper in Art”
Volare in Cielo o Paradiso
Flying Machines by Adrian Nivola
Adrian Nivola's sculptures express an aspiration for flight stripped of scientific understanding
and practical considerations. Each is therefore emphatically absurd from a functional standpoint
and incapable of fulfilling its promise to leave the earth. Yet as sculptures, their unlikely
ambition is essential to their character and aesthetic value. Each represents an exuberant
if ill-informed shot at a romp in the sky. And like many human characters, who go through
elaborate pains to fulfill a purpose only to veer severely off course, they are no less lacking for
lyrical grace in the process.