Render. Solo show, June 2015
Nicola Holden’s practice addresses the physicality of painting; stretcher, surface, tension, ground, pigment, colour, light, and frame.
This show, render; from the Old French rendre (“to render, to make”) acknowledges that these paintings are made, not painted. They give an interpretation or rendition of a painting.
These works deceive. They are slippery. They never settle into a fixed colour, texture, or weight. They are light, but seem to be made of metal or plywood. The basic structure of painting - surface, then ground, then pigment - is altered, such that paint sometimes sits between two surfaces, or a second surface becomes the ‘ground’. Masking tape is used as devise to draw across the surface, damaging the membrane in order to render its path.
The works activate and are activated by the space they occupy, refracting and reflecting the fluctuating light qualities in the surrounding area. As the viewer moves, so to do the works, shifting their visual state to become something quite different. Colour and light are enrolled for their inherent abstraction, their unpredictability, and the impossibility of their containment. Materials are chosen for their light reflecting qualities and contrast. Warm orange and gold beneath bright cobalt blue results in shifting, rich surfaces which show illusionary depth.
There are references across the idioms of abstract painting - the austerity of minimalism, the graphic lines of pop-art, the logic of geometric abstraction, the intensity of colour-field painting - and yet they don’t quite fit in any of those fields. Lead by Blinky Palermo’s Stoffbilder or ‘Fabric Pictures’ (1966 - 1972) which did away with paint altogether and “fashioned severe modernist abstractions from swathes of solid-colored department store fabric”1 these works are made of both high and low materials; of readymade acrylic, and delicate silk.
New York Times, Roberta Smith, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/arts/design/blinky-palermo-retrospective-1964-1977-review.html?_r=0
Under, over. Solo show, June 2013
Nicola Holden’s practice addresses the physicality of painting; the wooden support, the fabric surface, pigment and light. Her works acknowledge both painting-as-object and painting-as-picture; well aware of the discipline's conventional physical constraints and historical precedence.
Colour and light are enrolled for their inherent abstraction, their unpredictability, and the impossibility of their containment. The works activate and are activated by the space they occupy, refracting and reflecting the fluctuating light qualities in the surrounding area. They act as frames; and often what is literally being framed is the wall’s empty surface and the light there within the painting.
The cotton surface is either left uncoloured - a maze of weft and warp permeated by the radiating light, or colour-saturated by the pigment held within the fabric fibres. The paint is then applied both under, and over the surface.
Acknowledging the conventions of minimalism and geometric abstraction, the works undo any grand modernist gestures with their modest scale and delicate, translucent surfaces. The paintings are physical and present but also point outside of themselves.
GRID / COLOUR / PLANE Seven non-figurative Auckland Painters.
Show at Malcolm Smith Gallery, Uxbridge, Auckland. 6th March - 22nd April 2017.
Writing by Julian McKinnon, curator.
You may well have noticed the very prosaic nature of the title – Grid/Colour/Plane. Such a headline would seem to lend itself to a discussion of almost painfully formal aspects of painting. Indeed, non-figurative or ‘abstract’ painting is in many ways a deeply formal practice, with its roots in the deconstruction of image, the reduction of painting to its most elemental. We can discuss abstract art as being painting about painting, or to borrow a deliberate misnomer from the late great Kirk Varnedoe ‘pictures of nothing’. I don’t want to delve too much into a semantic deconstruction of the word ‘picture’, but I think it’s reasonable to say that many of the works here are more concerned with the formal object of paint and support than in the creation of imagery.
Whilst the formal concerns of constructing paintings about painting are a dimension of what this is all about, it is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I recently found myself discussing this with a very intelligent friend who was not necessarily taken with my assumptions and dogmas. This is a difficult sort of a conversation to have, though also in many ways a useful one. Being put in a position where it’s necessary to articulate your reasons for believing in something, and being passionate about it, without calling upon the staid rationale of accumulated histories, is a healthy experience. And perhaps also cause to re-examine what it is that you believe, and why.
Painting is, I believe, a form of poetry, a balancing of harmonies, and dissonances, an attempt to make visible the unseen, to reveal an aspect of the self, or some deeper facet of existence. In 2015, I was fortunate enough to meet Simon Njami, a Swiss/Cameroonian writer, curator, and academic. The occasion was the opening of his exhibition Xenopolis at Berlin’s Deutschbank Kunsthalle. Njami spoke to me of what he called “The inner world of chaos and sensation”, that is the personal interior that exists within each of us, the sum of dreams, heartbreaks, imaginings and disappointments, muddied as it is by thought and emotion, its understandings lensed through language and lived experience. He spoke of the capacity of art to bring this inner chaos and sensation of the artist, to meet the same juncture of being in the viewer – that the artwork then became a point of intersection, or a conduit, where a communication happens on a level quite outside of language, where indeed two universes of lived experience collide. His articulation of this was perhaps much more vivid than mine, shaped as it was by authoring hundreds of texts, curating scores of shows over decades, and friendships with the likes of James Baldwin. However the poignancy of its insight I hope speaks for itself.
Figurative artworks or ‘pictures of something’ are of course no less capable of mapping or expressing this rich and at times uncomfortable terrain of the psyche. Yet the language such works speak is necessarily tied in some way to a recreation of the observable. This may of course be my own idiosyncrasy speaking, though when painting is freed from such a requirement, it can speak of something more purely metaphorical, and open up avenues of thought of greater and more compelling depth.
Ultimately the nature of the visual can only be approximated in language, and what it triggers is inherently subjective, so I’ll leave you to have your own experiences and form your own opinions of the work on show. Though I would like to add, on a concluding note, that the work artists do is extremely difficult. It has no clear trajectory, it often has no financial incentive, its outcomes are at times intangible. Yet it is important, and those who do it generally have to, for reasons that aren’t necessarily logical, or easily understood. As I said earlier, painting is a form of poetry, and so in effort to describe the experience or aspiration of painting in the words of the tremendous, and tremendously troubled, romantic poet Arthur Rimbaud - “I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.”