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Nick Mauss is vorig jaar ook al een keer behandeld op Whatspace, maar in de tussentijd zo ontwikkeld en dus zeker een tweede post waard.
New York In 2005, Nick Mauss (b. 1980)
was catapulted into the permanent collection of MoMA with its
acquisition of over 40 drawings by him, part of the Judith Rothschild
Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. They are early works,
dating to 2003-04, mostly executed on marbled paper, and represent
prodigious flights of youthful fancy. Colors explode and dissolve free
of the restraint of form, flourishing with Kandinsky-like exuberance.
Mauss’s latest work, in marked contrast, is an exercise in finding
visual expression for silence. In addition to a new series of small
silver paintings on panel, his installation at 303 included three
large-scale works—Pavilion, Insert and Occasion—each a paragon of fragile strength. For example, Insert stands
9 feet tall and 10 feet wide, and is composed of a simple rectilinear
white wood structure supporting a giant sheet of white paper through
which an irregular shape has been torn, as though someone had walked
through it.
Mauss began the large group of silver paintings (all 2009) that were
the core of the recent exhibition after an intense period of drawing,
and they are finely balanced between the two mediums. He casts the
humble line as the solitary actor, confronting the representational
capacity of painting in much the same way that Jasper Johns does with
unmediated gray. But Mauss’s silver panels are less paintings about
paintings than are Johns’s, and are more elemental in their studies of
light and dark. Working with a severely restricted palette, Mauss
manages to convey everything from utter flatness to convincing depth,
from nebulousness to palpable forms such as the central vertical figure
in figure in a loom.
Before laying down the aluminum leaf that doubles for silver and
resists tarnishing, Mauss covers the wooden panels with a black acrylic
ground. Using a range of techniques, from rubbing and rasping to
stenciling, he creates palimpsests in which each mark is recorded, lost
and reinscribed. In their simplicity, the silver paintings are
reminiscent of those children’s plastic tablets on which one can record
a thought or a drawing and just as easily erase it. At the same time,
their shiny surfaces prompt the viewer to look from multiple angles, as
if staring at the dance of light on moving water. Mauss’s delicacy
recalls a similar quality in the work of Paul Klee, who so often
conveyed a sense of pleasure in creation.
Steve Pulimood (Art in America, 2010)
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