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Both the title and the construction of Nike Savvas's work, Communiqúe, imply that beneath the level of the objects with which we are presented, an actual and perhaps exigent message lies shrouded in encodement. Thus the work appears dense with trapped possibilities, at one remove from what knowledge of the code could release. The would-be decipherer of Communiqúe is placed, however, in a state of perpetual and frustrating denial as the work simultaneously demands and refuses decipherment. For the elements with which Savvas has furnished her code—a number of painted squares arranged grid-like on wall and floor, the four fluorescent colours with which they are painted, and thirty Ulysses butterflies—are intractable things, calculated to expose the limits of our interpretative reach.
That Savvas flatly denies us any kind of leverage, any familiar ground from which we can begin to comprehend the work, is clear once it is understood that Communiqúe is a code whose rules must be deciphered from the coded message alone. 'Meaning' must be drawn from the logic of the work's actual construction, not from an appeal to general experience outside the corporeal event of the installation. And accordingly, the sense of individual components—squares, colours, butterflies—cannot be deduced from the work as a whole in the way the sense of words is deduced from their overall contextualisation within a sentence. Savvas forces us to work from the other end, in the hope that some detail or other will make the subject of the code appear momentarily through the metaphoric veil. Yet we encounter nothing but a series of potential in-roads which reveal themselves as cui-de-sacs: a private language which can communicate only backwards to Savvas herself.
While