Nicholas Aguayo
Region: Pacific Coast
My paintings are objects that reveal the process of their making
through a layered transparency. The structural seams of the
paintings are laid bare, their surfaces acting as diagrams of
thought processes and decision-making.
Making paintings is a physical activity that is performative. The
tactility of painting and the use of concrete materials is a way of
responding to visual and physical experience in a tangible way. I
am interested in paintings (and abstraction in particular) not only
as a way of responding to these experiences tangibly, but also as
a vehicle to communicate a narrative or psychological effect that
exists outside language or representation.
In my recent paintings, compositional elements are organized in a
way that recalls an operating table, in which the anatomical parts
of a painting are dissected. The compositions swing between
harmony and a kind of dissonance. I’m interested in the paintings
resting in this state of almost falling apart, and in how this status
creates a tension that challenges and questions the expectations
of a painting.