If you thought that “good old modern art” cannot surprise you anymore, you have not seen the works of Brad Nault. 

Very skillfully, Nault leads us into the world of expression or neo-expressionism with a lot of dark shades and color so dominant in the works of expressionists. What’s more, the impression, atmosphere introduced by the artist is almost identical to the atmosphere of the expressionists. Of course, right there you have to wonder about the “classical” questions of rational and irrational, life and death and all those questions that follow such artistic expression. There would be nothing unusual and unexpected in all that but immediately, the artist transfers you to a completely different level - level of irony and auto irony by the effect of electric shock and provoking an esthetic tachicardia!

Nault’s most representative work on this subject surely is the one where he presents the artist in the shape of a monkey. This opens up the whole surge of different questions: does the monkey represent stupidity, does the “monkey” trifle with us, is it all about cynicism, irony, auto irony, summing up of the art today… It raises a great number of very important questions indeed. On top of all that, the option that the artist is so creatively toying with his interpreters should not be disregarded.

With (?) or without the author’s intention, the impression is that none of the eras are definitely finished and that there are always reasons to return to certain periods. Stylistically, we got back to the period of expressionism about which we talked more above. However, semantically it seems that we are catching up with the “locomotive” of modern art only now in a different way. The locomotive we are talking about used to have different names with different authors but most of them called it: avant-garde. Avant-garde used to destroy the shape, everything created over the centuries so that it could push artists into new enterprises and adventures regarding new creations. It seems to me that, in this case, there is an intentional insult and destruction, even ridicule, of a post-modern concept of art.

In other words, avant-garde does not follow solid concepts, not even when they are based on multimedia, multigenre expression, multistyle - all of which avant-garde itself used to insist on so much. 

© Nikola Kitanovic, 2002