Nick Baxter “Blood Rituals MMXVI” & Jon Clue “Ritual Magic”

Sacred Gallery

This event has ended.

Nick Baxter:
After a four-year hiatus, painter and tattooist Nick Baxter returns to NYC with an exhibition of all new work at SoHo’s Sacred Gallery, titled Blood Rituals.

This classically influenced series of 11 paintings sees Nick adapting his hyperrealist style to the traditions of Dutch still life and Trompe L’œil (“deceive the eye”) visual narratives.

The imagery in Blood Rituals conjures the mystery and intrigue of secret cult rites of passage and a strange baroque shamanism, while referencing the long tradition of bloodletting for health and spiritual purposes in both the East and West, including our current civilization’s ill-fated forebears, the ancient Roman Empire. Nick imbues these classical and historical influences with a contemporary sensibility, depicting modern medical tools in each image, along with other artifacts of industrialized society.

The show’s 40 x 26 inch centerpiece “Pull Me Through Time” blends the aforementioned influences with additional layers of art historical symbolism, including a compositional homage to Caravaggio’s “St. Jerome Writing”, to portray a haunting lamentation on life, death, and loss.

Blood Rituals opens November 12th at 8pm and will remain on view at Sacred Gallery until December 31. It will appear alongside an exhibition of new paintings by tattooer and fine artist Jon Clue.

Artist Bio:
Nick Baxter was born in 1981 in New Haven, Connecticut and remained in the area until 2008, when he relocated to Austin, Texas. He attended the Paier College of Art in Hamden CT (Dean’s List) where he learned the basics of sharp-focus still life painting in the classical Trompe L’œil style. He has since attended workshops at Grand Central Atelier in Queens, NY as well as teaching several of his own both in the U.S. and abroad. Nick has shown in various group exhibitions each year since 2003, including those of the International Guild Of Realism, and has been featured in juried publications such as Creative Quarterly. He has exhibited two solo shows at New York City’s Last Rites Gallery (2010, 2012), and has been twice accepted into the Art Renewal Center’s yearly juried International Salon publication as a finalist in the still life category.

Jon Clue crosses the aisle from Sacred Tattoo to Sacred Gallery to showcase alongside his contemporary, Nick Baxter, with his complimentary show, “Ritual Magic.”

With this installation, Jon forces upon his audience a magnified intimacy with the macabre and cadaverous, showcasing the veiled faces of his long deceased subjects. The subtext of what may otherwise seem a grotesque exhibition is the underlying ritual of care, concern, and respect for those passed. The eroded façade of each character stands in direct contradiction to the incorruptible spirit believed to have escaped the corporeal for the ethereal. The delicate white lace coverings offer a compassion for the departed; the pure everlasting white that escapes the fragmentation and erosion of the crumbled body. Within the lattice work is the ritualized preservation of the corpse, cast in the magic of orthodox, occult, and personal faith, but confronted with the pessimistic decay that turns to the dust of catacombs.

Complimenting the funerary binary of the cadaver, are cityscapes and architectural imaginings that draw their detail from the same pitted exterior of the featured skulls. Reminiscent of towering pyres, or perhaps catacombs, these decrepit structures compliment the personal confrontation of the individual with a landscape for the morose.

Arist Bio:
Jon Clue has been tattooing since 1993 and showcased domestically in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, as well as internationally in Norway and Japan. “Ritual Magic” marks Jon’s third involvement with Sacred Gallery.