Lost Portraits by Ricardo Nicolayevsky
A year after his passing, Anthology Film Archives will present the special program ‘Homage to Ricardo Nicolayevsky (1961-2023): Un Poeta en New York’, showcasing 65 minutes of experimental shorts by the multifaceted queer Mexican artist. Known for experimental work that delved into themes of gender and sexuality, Nicolayevsky was an influential artist, filmmaker, and musician who pushed past cultural and formal structures at every turn to create his style of transgressive lyricism. His creative endeavors spanned various disciplines, including music, cinema, video, literature, and cabaret.
Born in Mexico City in 1961, Nicolayevsky started developing painting and writing skills at an early age. In 1980, he moved to New York City, where he got a BFA from New York University (NYU) in Cinema Studies, and also took musical composition and musicology classes with Samuel Zyman and David Bradshaw. In 1987 and 1988, Nicolayevsky premiered his own compositions for piano at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall. From the early eighties, he composed music for short films, theater works, and radio programs.
Nicolayevsky was best known for his Lost Portraits (1982-1985), a series of lyrical portraits of friends and colleagues shot on Super8 and 16mm shot in the eighties in New York City. Each vignette was accompanied by a carefully crafted soundtrack, which he also composed. The series, which premiered in the late nineties, was awarded the top prize in the experimental category in Mexico City’s International Film Festival and was screened at numerous international venues. Some fragments of his series are part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
His films featured experimental in-camera techniques, innovative editing, and original musical scores, creating multilayered portraits that explored diverse personas, desires, and cinematic influences. His work drew from sources such as the Lumière brothers (if Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory were made while on mushrooms), the Surrealists, Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and beyond. The full impact of his work, later termed Lost Portraits, became evident only years later, receiving significant acclaim in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2005, Nicolayevsky premiered his series Portraits for a New Millennium, which consisted of 25 vignettes of the artist's friends and colleagues shot in Mexico City, New York, and Paris. Other film and video pieces include Scratches on My Brain (1982), NYC '83 (1983), 2 Exercises (1985), Mexican Cinema for Dummies (2001-2002), and The Private Life of a Former Artist (1982-1983).
In addition to his film and video work, he ventured into performance and cabaret, and in 2004, he was invited to perform at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) with his group of improvised music “Cabaret Gutenberg.” In 2010, he published the collection book 300 Aforismos, and later, in 2013, curated a dual gallery exhibit and editorial project titled MAMOTRETO, which he described as “contemporary virtual poetry” dedicated to the lives of the women in his family.
Anthology Film Archives’ program, curated with Nicolayevsky’s close friend and creative partner-in-crime, media artist Ximena Cuevas, and organized by Kathy Brew, Cinema Tropical’s Carlos A. Gutiérrez, and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, honors Nicolayevsky’s enduring legacy by screening a selection of Lost Portraits alongside later works, such as Autorretratos eróticos (2005-2009), Polipticos (2009), and La vie parisienne (2002-2005).
For more information visit http://anthologyfilmarchives.org.
