In limbooo

Written by Marina may

october 21, 2021

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 a 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.

Schleicher obscures the impact of the hand, incorporating very few gestures. Through a series of pulls of paint each layer is applied with precision and intention. Schleicher’s process taps into the paradox of control: it dictates the output and establishes the conditions for experimentation. These parameters, though on their face may appear constraining, alleviate the anxiety of choice, allowing for a greater degree of compositional improvisation and for consistent, evolving dialogue with the paint. 

The shaped canvases are themselves imperfect - an overt rejection of clinical crispness. The curved tops of the altar pieces wiggle. Paint escapes the boundary of the canvas, congealing, forming new edges, warbling with the dogged determination to evade containment. The coagulation of colors, greens on pinks, overset with lavender, shouldn’t make sense. They shouldn’t interact or mix as they do. Schleicher layers these colors over one another, granting them the permission and space to play, beyond his control. In this way, his paintings are a response to a state of conscious ambiguity. The works crystalize the experience of uncertainty, exalting the beauty of the ambiguous state. Schleicher suspends time as he meticulously preserves the history of the work, or the composition of layers from foreground to background. In this way, his work encourages the viewer to consider the present and to be where they are.

LIMBOOO also encompasses a series of shelves and shelf paintings - designed to contain a very specific object or set of objects, which are removed from the final work. The omission of the highly specific reference leaves a void in the work. This emptiness becomes a “holding space” for the objects, ideas, people, and emotions that shape the past and inform the future self. The viewer is prompted to consider how identity is constructed through the accumulation of material objects, and then how we present those objects, and by extension, ourselves to the world. 

The pieces in conversation challenge the relationship between memory, object, painting, sculpture, and void. The pairings of shelves and paintings invoke a mantle or shrine without devotions or offerings. In the color-field or embedded within the negative space defined by an empty shelf, the viewer is tasked to lean into the ambiguity and reflect upon something forgotten or an unrealized potential. There’s a discomfort with a lack of specificity, especially as it relates to the formation of identity and a natural tendency to define ourselves through rigid parameters that are constructed from the external influences of our material and emotional surroundings.