NICK SCHLEICHER
Nick Schleicher presents a series of paintings with the indelible ability to soften harshness and bring levity to the overly serious. They make beautiful the roughness of life and loss, easing the pains of growing up. This series specifically investigates the parameters of permanence, finding comfort in the ambiguity of a life in flux.
With the introduction of the shaped canvas, the exactness of hardline abstraction dissolves in favor of something more human. Delicately warped circles and semicircles loosely recall portals and tombstones. Pointed arches reference clerestories, though they are stripped of their religious connotations, leaving their celestial potential. The borders of the rectangular works wriggle with residual paint. This rejection of a regular container mirrors the artist’s reluctance to accept forced permanence. A celebration of the interim, these paintings lean into imperfection with humor and humanity that make them feel authentic.
For Schleicher, form is a means of synthesis. His abstract, color-field paintings are derived from an array of influences that hold personal value (Marvel comics, a Berber carpet, a restaurant heater). They would be far more oblique and markedly less potent if they were to be representational. Through distillation, Schleicher develops a more empathetic approach to minimalism, wherein abstraction becomes a vehicle for projection. The canvas shifts to something ambiguous and precious as he translates this representational subject matter to pure color.
