NICHOLAS SZYMANSKI

Nicholas Szymanski (b. 1989, Michigan) lives and works in Grand Rapids. The artist’s paintings are composed of oil paint and sometimes particulate media on various weights of canvas and linen, often stretched over wooden panels. The compositions oscillate between a single color or many colors, carefully applied over the surface. He frequently uses tape to create sharp divisions between colors, which emphasizes the minutiae of the paintings and their processes. Such subtleties as slippages in paint, evidence of editing, and textural attributes bring humanity to the forefront of what appears to be an intransigent application. Successive layers of accumulation build toward unity and resolution in the picture plane, complicating material and perceptual attributes. Szymanski’s work provides a variegated approach to painting. The paintings are both
additive and subtractive, often referencing found forms and colors, photography, and memories as starting points. Through a mixture of systematic and aleatory processes, the pictorial elements
of the work exist as meditations on chromatic phenomena, the passage of time, presence, and the exterior. The question of how one may work within an area of art using the same restrictions stated and explored in the past underpins the paintings. Within these limitations, can the conversation be advanced and the work assuaged from its past? While maintaining avoidance of direct narrative, the compositions investigate conceptual elements. The foundation of his interest, discipline, and praxis in painting is the idea of Purposelessness. Szymanski views this as an experiential attitude arrived at through the process of making and viewing his work. The
paintings are slowly developed over time without a distinct 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, the pathos of things, a Japanese idea in which a viewer is aware of the ephemeral beauty of a world essentially marked by change and an aversion to definition.

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