gosee premium member

Blog: Nicolas Party 'Three Seasons' / Xavier Hufkens Gallery, 19 May—15 July 2017

by GoSee ART // 5 Files //  

0

// back to blogs

 
For his inaugural exhibition at the gallery, Swiss artist Nicolas Party has executed two site-specific murals that transform the interior while creating a singular environment for a recent group of large-scale pictures and bronze sculptures. Working exclusively in vivid, highly-pigmented chalk pastels – either directly on the walls or primed canvases – Party invites us to rediscover this once popular but now often neglected medium. Respectful of the traditions that precede him on the one hand, but radically extending them on the other, the artist’s handling of the medium is anything but academic. Here, all associations with drawing, delicacy and fragility have been supplanted by a fresh, graphic sensibility and a technique more akin to painting. Unlike paint, however, pastels are blended directly upon the support: a task that requires great exactitude and foresight. While the popularity of pastels has waxed and waned over the centuries, their physical properties remain unchanged. From a seventeenth-century portrait to an Impressionist landscape, up to and including Party’s contemporary iterations, works in pastel are distinguished by a single unique quality: their luminosity.

Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party works across a wide range of different media. Primarily known for his colour-saturated paintings and murals, he also makes painted sculptures, pastels, installations, prints and drawings, and works as a curator. Party often paints portraits and still lifes of everyday objects, which he strips of all extraneous detail. Rather than creating faithful depictions from nature, he uses these seemingly innocuous subjects as springboards for an exploration into the art of painting itself. His concerns lie, therefore, less in the accurate depiction of nature, and more in its translation and transformation through colour, materials and composition.
IMAGE // Nicolas Party 'Three Seasons' at Xavier Hufkens Gallery
IMAGE // Nicolas Party 'Three Seasons' at Xavier Hufkens Gallery
IMAGE // Nicolas Party 'Three Seasons' at Xavier Hufkens Gallery
IMAGE // Nicolas Party 'Three Seasons' at Xavier Hufkens Gallery
IMAGE // Nicolas Party 'Three Seasons' at Xavier Hufkens Gallery
 
0
0 Comments

// back to blogs