Painting and Collage

31^st May – 25^th June 2005 ,  Mon-Sat 10am-10pm, Sun 3-9pm
Private View: Wednesday 1^st June.  6.00 – 8.30 pm
  

The Tricycle Gallery is pleased to present the painting and collage of  J.A Nicholls.  A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Nicholls’ playful paintings were selected by Gary Hume for a survey of contemporary British painting at the Hastings Museum in 2004 and Craig Burnett, art critic for the Guardian, describes this artist as one to watch out for.

In these works, a single sea or sky is made and, more importantly, felt in several registers at the same time. It is sensed in a sudden outburst of badly mixed blue paint, a triangular play of photographed light on water and in the hand-made intimacy of a wavy biro line. Similarly, a single subject in a boat on water, in city streets and sometimes in passing company is recognised and remembered through samples of visual imagery, each bit carrying a discrete sense of time and association.

There is the presence of new possibility in these combos sampled from the array of idioms used to communicate the who, the what and the where of contemporary life. Images that have had their day elsewhere in magazines, forgotten life drawings, newspapers, smears of paint tested on a studio wall. The invitational push and pull present in the products of mass circulation co-mingle unpredictably with hand-made marks less certain of their potency. In-your-face, flat no-go zones of colour abut pastures absorbent in their transparency. Perspectives, scales, histories, times and paces energetically posture for new significance.

The work seems drawn by a kind of awkwardness, ineptitude, a desire to join things together which don’t customarily belong. It craves what might be described as ‘a something-happening on the horizon’. It doesn’t have a name but is derived from the  unexpected meeting of marks, the brave struggle between omnipotence, control, power and heroic messiness.

 

Nicholls is also showing work in ‘The Lost Night’ at the Prenelle Gallery, ‘Lounger’ at Lounge Gallery and ‘Current Vision'  at Sartorial Contemporary.

Tricycle Gallery