NYAB Event - Nick Mead "Paintings"

Nick Mead "Paintings"

The Hole

This event has ended.

The Hole presents a solo show of paintings by Nick Mead. In this group of new works, Mead explores a technique that blends abstraction and thickly impastoed moments of semi-figuration: his stark, tangled paintings of controlled scrawl ball up in some of the intersections and bespeckle the negative spaces in masses of paint that are then given "eyes". The large canvasses are rawly taupe and in the seepages of the oil into the fabric--compounded by the directionality of the black and the mountainous surfaces of the eyes--create a strange topography. Are they a schematic of a storm system, a landscape of thatch and hay; a core sample showing layers of shale, slate and hidden igneous deposits? Compounded with the art-historical evocations: the playfulness of a Klee or Miró is crossed with something uniquely digital feeling: something very contemporary about them that suggests sound frequencies, sub-atomic diagrams, thickets of vectors and confused conduits. Are they Jazz, perhaps, or Deep House? As with many works that seem both inter-cellular and inter-stellar, they seem to address the way humans make sense of the non-delineated continuity of the natural world around us.

The manner of application supports the visual effect of controlled chaos as these paintings appear expressionistic but are not solely intuitive, hasty, or written and re-written. For something so lyrical, these paintings are clearly premeditated and "just-so". The eye wants to remain playful in the flows of abstraction but it can’t help but encounter at some point the innumerable "eyes" looking back at it. Like an Argus exploded through its infinite potentiality of being, these paintings stare back at us and self-consciously catch us looking.

This is a special one-week show in Gallery Three, not to be missed. Nick Mead is from Somerset, UK and lives in Connecticut.