NYAB Event - Nolan Simon "Paintings"

Nolan Simon "Paintings"

47 Canal

This event has ended.

…paintings which hang on walls, naturally.

Though, at the moment, a week before the show opens, this isn’t strictly true of my paintings. My paintings are currently strewn around my studio. I suppose it is still true for paintings generally, but who cares about paintings generally?

The paintings in this show were made with a projector. Caravaggio used to do this with a camera obscura. I used a digital projector and painted directly from it. I didn’t bother drawing. I don’t think Courbet used projection, or Manet.

I am a painter of light, so to speak. 4chan’s painter of light.

The show should really be called something like “The LORD makes the world empty, and makes it waste, and turns it upside down.”

I shouldn’t say I didn’t bother drawing, like it’s a bother. I just decided that it wasn’t necessary in this case, and why do something unnecessary?

The paintings have an infrastructure, the way a joke has a rhythm and logic to it. I’m terrible at telling jokes. They work like inside jokes between one another - between the paintings in the show. If you want in on the joke, the answers are pasted on the back. There’s no shame in not wanting to do the work, or wanting to go about it backwards, or whatever else might motivate you to want to know.

Of course, there are far more paintings in storage than those that hang on walls. Unless you include all the paintings people have in their homes and workplaces, then I really couldn’t hazard a guess.

Come to think of it, it’s also not totally accurate to say that these paintings are like in-jokes. They’re about communicating with people with images and about loving your neighbor and what it might mean to understand something that someone else loves. It’s about how insane it is to love your neighbor. And they were painted between December and May, mostly.

Also, I guess there’s sometimes reason enough to do something unnecessary.