The Brooklyn Rail

When polymath Peter Nadin moved from New York more than thirty years ago to live at Old Field Farm, his rural property in the Catskill Mountains, he consciously left behind his role as a key figure in the city’s downtown art scene for a more contemplative lifestyle. Despite this, Nadin never stopped painting and two years ago had a debut exhibition at Off Paradise, The Distance From a Lemon to Murder. These paintings, mostly made during the COVID-19 pandemic, drew inspiration from Nadin’s interest in plant grafting; in his greenhouse the artist experimented with melding one type of lemon plant with another, and undertook painting from life. The paintings and sculpture in his present show, The Invisible World, push the ideas Nadin generated in his previous exhibition to new realms.

In Nadin’s new body of work, brilliant orange fish fly off into the sky, and sometimes so do people. An invisible groom weds his bride, and the installation of municipal utility lines takes place in the Garden of Eden, with Adam himself as head of the work crew. In these paintings Nadin continues to portray the scenery, neighbors, animals, and plants that surround him upstate, with the concept of grafting at the forefront, suffusing the works with an import of magical realism. Yes, these settings, these characters, those donkeys all materially exist. But on these canvases, Nadin seems to ask: Can we actually trust what our own eyes see? And how do we know it’s the case, that what we see is truly what is before us? Most potently, what is reality, anyhow?

Works like Sharkey’s Donkey Watching a Fish (A Migration of Golden Orfe) (2023) provide an entry into these metaphysical inquiries. Here, two white donkeys rest on a riverbed, one of them gazing into the water at a large, orange fish (a Golden Orfe, which makes repeated appearances throughout these works) while a small family lounges on the riverbed nearby. All but one seem oblivious to the action that surrounds them as they drowse on the waters’ shores—a swirl of orange fish stream from the river into the sky, carried by upward winds, or fins, or alchemy. The lone figure who sees them stands on a small ledge away from the rest of the group, arm extended in an action of stretching for an airborne fish. Whose reality is genuine? By their numbers, it would seem the unconcerned humans and animals have the grasp of materiality; no one seems bothered by a school of flying fish. But that single individual, his rendered gesture so pure and humane, gives us pause. He sees the fish in flight, he knows it so surely he reaches out to try and catch one. To say which is the actual experience is impossible, and perhaps, both are true.

Nadin’s deliberation of his marks in paint, obvious in that poignantly executed arm of the reaching man, is evident in works throughout the show. In The Blue Rope (2023) a glamorous young couple idle in a small boat tethered to a dock in a verdant landscape. The canvas is an abundance of purple, blue, and green tones, but close inspection reveals how Nadin has strategically cut into the surface of the canvas, revealing gashes of red underpainting beneath the topcoats. The red streaks add a note of unease to the otherwise picturesque scene, reminding the viewer that what is outwardly visible is not necessarily the full range of reality.

A small selection of Nadin’s sculpture is also on display. The most affecting work, Three Self Portraits with a Ripening Lemon, is a small, painted bronze of one of the artist’s favorite shoes. The soft, custom-made leather shoe is one of a pair the artist walked in for over a decade, before time and the body wore them away. Realizing that the shoes marked a passage of his own life, Nadin had one cast in bronze, memorializing the cracks in the leather where his toes broke through. On the inside of the shoe, he has painted a small portrait of his own face, a likeness that repeats as a motif across his work (the same facial portrait also appears in How I Look, What I See in Baracoa When I’m Not There [Self Portrait in Absentia], [2022] another self-portrait painting in the show). Finally, the shoe rests upon a cast lemon, the fruit that provided the genesis of Nadin’s grafting. Shoe, lemon, likeness, fused together to make up a fantastical rendering of the artist, which can neither be proven nor disproven as a reality.