The Brooklyn Rail

Nicolas Africano’s diminutive replicas of youthful male acrobats are, among other things, explorations of the viewer’s response to the real replicated at small scale. The hands, feet, musculature, and faces of the little beings are reproduced so faithfully, we can almost see them breathing. But the smaller the sculpture gets, the less it mirrors the viewer’s presence and the more it tends towards expressing a narrative. Africano’s narrative is drawn from Pablo Picasso’s enigmatic series of “Acrobat” paintings from the turn of the twentieth century, such as Young Acrobat on a Ball and Young Acrobat and Child, both from 1905. Picasso’s “Acrobats” was a cycle of paintings which presented an odd subcategory of society: impoverished families of athletic performers—Saltimbanques—who could flip, dance, and contort themselves for their audience’s amusement. There are elements of danger and refined skill that mark the acrobat, as well as the sympathy and admiration they prompt in the eye of the artist and viewer.

Africano distills the story down to a boy; he is intrigued by the physical possibilities of the figure standing, sitting, or in repose with his sparse costume and accoutrements of play. It is the most basic form of entertainment simply to watch a person move. Africano and Picasso savor the opportunity to gaze at the static form of an acrobat at rest. The sculptures Aliki, Boudari, and Kolymbithres (all 2023–25) present a youthful male figure in contrapposto pose, while Santa Maria (2023–25) sits on a dark brown glass cube and Tripiti (2023–25) rests against a glowing blood red orb. Potential energy informs both Picasso’s and Africano’s assessments of the body, as opposed to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s or Georges Seurat’s more tense and animated depictions of circus performers.

Africano’s works on paper engage movement: A Talent to Amuse (High Wire) and A Talent to Amuse (High Wire/Bar) (both 2025) depict the male figure balancing effortlessly on a wire that crosses the bottom of the paper horizontally, mimicking its lower edge. A Talent to Amuse (Hoops) (2025) shows him in a gentle “S” curve, while a series of fragile rings seem to vibrate down his lower body. The faces in the gouache paintings reference Picasso’s palette; they are pale with expansive highlights and delicately modeled. There is a gentle and calm serenity in the face’s disposition, with half-closed or downcast eyes. The same is true of the semi-transparent flesh tones of Africano’s bronze sculptures: these beings are either lost in their activities or seem aware of our gaze and are distant and slightly disdainful of our interest. In A Talent to Amuse (Ring of Fire) and A Talent to Amuse (Snow Globe) (both 2025) the figure is inscribed in a ring and a sphere respectively, the latter image transforming the person into a toy, a literal object of entertainment. In A Talent to Amuse (Globe) (2025), Africano reproduces the set-up of Picasso’s Young Acrobat on a Ball (1905) but leans in heavily toward the geometry of sphere and figure—adding the hexagonal pattern of the paper towel with which he blots the fluid background of the gouache—for good measure.

The juxtaposition of geometry and human form arises naturally from the acrobat’s profession: either from the choreographed arcs and circles in which he must move or the tools of his trade, rings and juggling/balancing balls. For Picasso, these take a back seat to the costume of the performer and the abjectness of his lot. Africano sheds the social implications of the Saltimbanques, instead choosing a healthy, if not ethereal, beauty. Each sculpture engages with a sphere, except for the aforementioned Santa Maria (2023–25), who sits on a cube, and Boudari (2023–25), who holds a voluminous white robe, which seems to be obscuring something, probably another sphere. Like the frequent Renaissance conceit, deployed by Michelangelo and Bronzino, of the grotesque face positioned next to the youth to emphasize its prized and fleeting nature, the cubes and spheres seem calculated to bring out the young acrobat’s complicated and flowing musculature, the body’s hardness and softness, and the mysterious bony substructure that can be the source of transient beauty. There is the opacity and dullness of bronze posited against the glowing transparency of the glass, as well. The viewer’s own nostalgia for visits to the circus, a love of pre-Cubist Picasso, and appreciation of youth and all the potential it holds all swirl together in Africano’s boys, reminding us that art often hinges on narrative types, and we don’t need to let them go.