Opening Friday November 10th, 6-9pm
UNION Gallery is pleased to present Nick Jensen’s Rising Wild exhibition with the artist’s latest body of paintings.
In Rising Wild, Jensen strives to portray all the wonders, anxieties, and wildness of the world around him and do this all at the same time. As a father, Jensen has connected with how childhood feelings have started to return since becoming a parent.
“Being with kids and spending time with them has made me think that rather than separating my subject matter, I should encourage myself to think about my surroundings and my experience with them.”
- Nick Jensen
In this show things are wild. A school trip with children climbing a rock, the act of throwing a paper airplane, a passing face, are all timeless in space, uncultivated, free spirited. They hold but a moment in time, a glance, the viewer is caught in each preserved interaction of Jensen’s visual narrative.
Drawing on an appreciation of Cubism there are clear references to the divided line against dissolving space. The anatomising of space and in how things are represented. The interplay between the real and the dismantled. An object like a star which occupies a symbolic role but is also just a squiggly outline.
The physical nature of a painting has always been of interest to the artist. Jensen creates his own paints, in his exploration of the material relationship to his subject matter. Jensen constructs a conversation about how much the materiality of paint finds its own language, where it’s possible to render lucid and abstract impressions, much like how life feels.
Accompanying text by Eddy Frankel
Grief comes in so many guises. It doesn't just come in stages, or after a loved one dies, it comes in different shapes, at different times, in different ways. And underneath all the haze, soft colours and bright light of this new series of paintings by Nick Jensen, there is an aching sense of mourning, a palpable, tangible, almost salty cheeked grief that courses through each work.
His son stands on a table throwing a paper airplane, or draping a blanket over his back like a set of improvised wings. The artist pulls his daughter and her friends along on a toy train, kids clamber up rocks, grasses sway in the wind, figures from the streets of Tottenham stand against vast blank walls. Boring everyday objects become tools of fantasy; a table is a runway, a rock is a climbing frame.
These are paintings full of youth, but full of loss too. The youth is theirs, the kids’; and the loss is the artist’s own youth, thrown into fragmented, sharp relief. Because you look at your kid and you see what's it like to take in the world without boundaries, without limits, to encounter things in life for the first time, figure them out, twist them, mould them, comprehend them without prejudice or the crushing weight of experience; to be – more than anything – innocent.
And when you see that innocence, you have to mourn your own loss of it. You, with all your weary years of knowing the right way from the wrong way, your decades of societal expectations, familiar responsibilities and all the bull shit of being a functional adult; you’ll never see the world anew again, never have that innocence. That’s the mourning, that’s the grief.
The paintings look light, airy, soft. But that lightness is a mask hiding thick, home-made paints that crack and glob and sputter across the canvases. They look thin and watery, but they’re laden, dense, the lightness is just a brave face. The smaller works are darker though, somehow more English, like Constable with glaucoma.
Being based on photos, the paintings live in that uncanny valley between reality and fantasy. Instead of being a depiction of a thing that happened, they become the artist’s interpretation of that thing, a mediated, manipulated vision of the past; a single memory repurposed and rethought and repainted, over and over again. You have the event, you have the memory of the event, you have the photo of the event; and then, when you translate it into paint, you have this mess of meaning and emotion, this desperate attempt to make sense of the world.
So what does it mean when Nick paints his son? Or a wall in Tottenham? Or a woman on the street? The paintings aren’t family snapshots, or diaristic visions of parenting or north London life, they’re a process, an untangling of feelings and thoughts and the past, an attempt to make sense of loss and time and memory. They are, in other words, grief.