Nicholas Heskes
Nicholas Heskes is an artist, writer, and translator.
Experiencing the scale and material surface of Meoni’s artworks is necessary for them to be appreciated, felt, and understood for what they are: at times haunting reveries into obscurantism and proof of the suggestive power of marks on a surface.
A national of both Kenya and England, Michael Armitage has located past subject matter in the part of Africa he hails from. In Crucible the photographic material he draws from originates in Saharan Africa, the large region in the northern part of the continent with a substantially long, continuous, and violent history of migration in every direction across its immense desert terrain and out into the Atlantic Ocean.
May 2025ArtSeen
Genevieve Goffman: All the words that came down to meet the body that came up from the ground
What is most unusual about Goffman’s golem is that it does not resemble a human being, but rather a Chimera, a Pokémon, or a witch’s familiar, rendered in the style of a Japanese “lucky cat.”
The pareidolic impulse is alive in Michael Alexander Campbell’s paintings. He seems to be intently searching for something that might arise from fragmentary lines, blotches, and strokes of paint, and he prompts the viewer to do the same.
Is the meaningful substance of an artwork its aesthetic qualities or the circumstances surrounding its creation? Both aspects are always valid and at play, especially in painting, where one is dealing with a picture and an art object at once.
February 2024ArtSeen
Daniel Guzmán: the man who should be dead: notes on the dead house, the fire and the tale
According to Guzmán, the central inspiration for The Man Who Should Be Dead is hexagram 18 (Ku: decay) of the I Ching. The hexagram has a double message. Firstly, that something has been spoiled, and, secondly, that what has been spoiled needs to be worked on.
Equally painter and poet, Fain’s literary work was inseparable from painting. Modern-ish aims to represent the richness of Fain’s life and career by exhibiting his paintings, books, ephemera, and a video interview all in the same space.
Much has already been said about Crackle & Drag, TR Ericsson’s ongoing tribute to his mother Sue as it has passed through various iterations since her suicide in 2003. Crackle & Drag is also the title of an early video Ericsson made of his mother’s archive.
Early in the pandemic Henry Gunderson moved into a run-down building in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In exchange for renovating it, he was allowed to live there without rent for six months. The place became Gunderson’s home and studio, where he created the “House” series now exhibited at Perrotin Gallery alongside other new paintings that follow the same thread as much of his previous work.
For the European Impressionists, the method of plein air painting was meant to be an interpretation rather than an attempt at faithful reproduction—a dramatic shift from earlier approaches to landscape painting which relied on preliminary sketches, in-studio techniques, and the work of other painters to create a convincing imitation of nature. Will Bruno finds himself situated somewhere between these two approaches to the landscape in Midnight River, his current exhibition at Europa Gallery.
H. R. Giger’s work is stunningly imaginative and darkly enticing, but it also leaves me feeling empty. Why this is is something I’ve been trying to parse out for myself—maybe I’m not alone in feeling this way. But I was confronted with this feeling once again upon visiting the retrospective of Giger’s work at Lomex gallery.
Every bit of color imperfection and grain on the CRT display is rendered precisely and on a magnified scale. The effect is a clash of worlds (at least on the formal level) in which archaic electronic media is worked onto elements of the Western European canon.
The most recent exhibition by Los Angeles painter Daniel Gibson at Almine Rech summons various descriptors to mind: psychedelic, floral, surreal, Boschian. But the one that connects them all is autochthonous.
This series of more than 300 images, carefully selected from Patterson’s archive by curator Gryphon Rue, covers a relatively brief but volatile period between 1985 and 1999, during which Patterson played an important role as documenter of the vibrant culture, crime, and transformation of the Lower East Side.
Rivlin abandons the impulse to make unlikely or surprising combinations of things convey a message, or play a role, if even a small one. The sculptures rather act out on their own, bringing attention to a permanent wound they share, not broken, repurposed, or fixed, but indefinitely repairable.
This exhibition at 15 Orient is the first of Serbian-Macedonian painter Ljiljana Blazevska’s in the United States. The context that makes Blazevska’s work approachable in the US is obscured by the extremely personal, sequestered nature it has all of its own, that makes each painting, like a private dream or memory, untranslatable for the viewer.
Drawings like those made by Jones, though accepted into the canon, remain at odds with what is generally thought of as “art” as a result of their sincerity and independence. It seems to me that this type of work, which arises out of the necessity of existential conditions, has the potential to collapse the often-arbitrary division between art and life.
Now online, this project inevitably represents a reduction of the original installation, but it is nonetheless a clever reframing that responds thoughtfully to its changed circumstances.
A square printout taped to the table that displays the exhibition literature reads, "BUT… Would information obtained by psychic means be accurate enough to suit the Intel community's needs? Would the Intel community accept information which had been obtained through psychic means?" A black and white illustration of a stoplight accompanies these questions, as if meant to signal a moment of pause.
The mystery of alchemy is more appealing than its promise of truth.
What makes a story compelling without being told? This question lingered with me after seeing Sanya Kantarovsky’s exhibition On Them. His paintings, drawings, and prints have long shared an eerie likeness to novel illustration, and give the impression of Russian novels—though only vaguely.
David Byrd died in 2013 at the age of 87 in Oxford, New York. Since then his paintings have gradually received attention, resulting in a number of exhibitions in recent years
Birth Canal, Marguerite Humeau’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, is presented in conjunction with Birth Canal Drawings at CLEARING’s upper east side location
