WAITING ROOM
NICHOLAS SZYMANSKI - The Smell of Burnt Almonds
On view: February 3 - March 11, 2022
Nicholas Szymanski’s work provides a variegated approach to painting. His work is both additive and subtractive, often times referencing found forms and colors, photography, and poetry as starting points. Through a mixture of the purely intentional and aleatory processes the pictorial elements of the work have the quality of being meditations on the passage of time, presence, and the exterior. The paintings read in multifaceted ways. Investigations of scale, color, application, surface, light, interpretations of poetry, art history, and the natural world. The work is related to the trajectory of abstraction and philosophies the artist finds resonant in his own life. The question of how one may work within an area of art using the same restrictions which have been stated and explored in the past is an undercurrent of the paintings. Within these limitations, is it possible to advance the conversation and relieve the work from its past?
The compositions, while maintaining an avoidance of direct narrative do investigate conceptual elements. The foundation of Szymanski’s interest and practice in painting is the idea of Purposelessness. The artist views this as an experiential attitude arrived at through the process of making and viewing his work. The paintings are slowly developed over a duration of time without an end goal. Through this approach the work becomes self-informed, intuitive and perceptual. The subject of the paintings is a quiet and experiential engagement. This may be likened to the concept of Aware, a Japanese idea in which a viewer arrives at an awareness of the ephemeral beauty of a world essentially marked by change and an aversion to definition.
Each work is an individual event containing its own dynamic and sense of situation within a longer tradition of painting. The artist strives to avoid narrative within the confines of the picture plane. In turn the paintings take on a range of feeling and through the investigation of the surface Szymanski arrives at compositions telling of a desire to observe the ineffable. The work drives toward a sensibility of the real before it is sliced up into conceptualism. A suggestion that painting may exist beyond the limits of language
Nicholas Szymanski (B. 1989 Grand Rapids, Michigan) lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan (USA). Szymanski describes his work as being “All between shores; it exists in an endless state of becoming and has a kind of self- evident authority. I like to describe it as purposelessness; there is an absence of necessity in the work.” His work has been shown within and outside of the United States. The artist’s most recent solo exhibition ‘A Hundred Revisions’ was held at 65 Grand Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. Preceding this Szymanski’s work has been shown in New York, California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, The Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The artist has been included in multiple publications, such as Studio Visit: Volume 27, Scandale Project Book: Art Is Vol 1, and most recently a critical assessment by art historian and critic Alex Bacon. Szymanski has earned a Fine Art Degree from Kendall College of Art and Design.
AL’S OFFICE
NICHOLAS SZYMANSKI
On view: September 9 - October 22, 2021
View Exhibition
Nicholas Szymanski’s work provides a variegated approach to painting. His work is both additive and subtractive, often times referencing found forms and colors, photography, and poetry as starting points. Through a mixture of the purely intentional and aleatory processes the pictorial elements of the work have the quality of being meditations on the passage of time, presence, and the exterior. The paintings read in multifaceted ways. Investigations of scale, color, application, surface, light, interpretations of poetry, art history, and the natural world. The work is related to the trajectory of abstraction and philosophies the artist finds resonant in his own life. The question of how one may work within an area of art using the same restrictions which have been stated and explored in the past is an undercurrent of the paintings. Within these limitations, is it possible to advance the conversation and relieve the work from its past?
The compositions, while maintaining an avoidance of direct narrative do investigate conceptual elements. The foundation of Szymanski’s interest and practice in painting is the idea of Purposelessness. The artist views this as an experiential attitude arrived at through the process of making and viewing his work. The paintings are slowly developed over a duration of time without an end goal. Through this approach the work becomes self-informed, intuitive and perceptual. The subject of the paintings is a quiet and experiential engagement. This may be likened to the concept of Aware, a Japanese idea in which a viewer arrives at an awareness of the ephemeral beauty of a world essentially marked by change and an aversion to definition.
Each work is an individual event containing its own dynamic and sense of situation within a longer tradition of painting. The artist strives to avoid narrative within the confines of the picture plane. The paintings contain a range of feeling and through the investigation of the surface Szymanski arrives at compositions telling of a desire to observe the ineffable. The work drives toward a sensibility of the real before it is sliced up into conceptualism. A suggestion that painting may exist beyond the limits of language.