Sebastian Nicolau

(click)

After Duplum, Ensembles and LAND, exhibitions around mainly sculptural works around the landscape evoked from abstraction, (click) may seem like a change, a turn in my work, however I think it is about the incorporation of a new register because This series recovers an iconography already developed in my realistic painting of the '80s and '90s. It is the adaptation of the format of those landscapes from a point of view that links digital painting with traditional analogue. A strategy that hybridizes not only techniques thatThey keep materials in common but also techniques that play in differentiated categories: light color and pigment color. A miscegenation that responds to my interest in recording the expressive possibilities of any means of artistic production previously developed with painting, drawing, sculpture or 3D animation and, in a singular way, photography, which in (click) intervenes at the service of the painting.

(click) It is also a parenthesis in my production but not independent from the rest of my work, since it contains part of my conceptual concerns (reality/fiction_abstraction/figuration_literality/story). It also explains the photographic process that underlies each work.

Non-existent landscapes, or rather, landscapes made up of different landscapes that I photograph separately, mobile in hand, and combine or modify to create a new one that will only exist as a plastic work. Landscapes basted together, digitally fused to create supposedly real spaces. Works of painting, of drawing, on works carried out with digital tools, brushes after all, to paint on an illuminated screen whose result is transferred to its reproduction on paper on aluminum to draw again analogically,covering the image with pastel, pastel pencil and watercolor. Creating a layer drawn on top of another, modifying it both physically and conceptually. Landscapes illuminated by matter-colored light and by unreal lights from fictitious neon tubes.

(click), landscapes (LAND again, as a continuum) with a certain romantic character that link with naturalist painting revisited through a prism connected to the memory of a nature witness and metaphor of the passage of time (The river that takes me / The current that takes us / In Ictu Oculi / The garden of lights / …).

Landscapes in which the photographic substrate remains as a nostalgic, melancholic background, barely glimpsed after the last drawing that tries to show the distance between Nature and those of us who observe it, far away, through its interpretation. To some extent confirming the loss of a paradise; Time. A lost paradise can only be recovered if, when we perceive the emotion of that moment, we do it positioned from a reflective gaze, when the distance between him and us lights up and shortens in a (click).

Francis Sebastian Nicolau

Press note:

Shiras Galería will open next January 26 at 7:00 p.m. the exhibition (click) of the artist Sebastián Nicolau (Valencia-1956). After his Duplum series exhibited in 2016 in Shiras, the artist returns to the gallery to show us his new project, (click), through twenty works distributed between our two rooms. Throughout his work, Sebastián Nicolau has been fixing his interest in the relationship established between what we think we see and what we really perceive. Always revolving around reality and fiction. Thus, figuration and abstraction are formulas that coexist and are part of a whole in which, at times, it is difficult to distinguish the limits of each one.

Sebastián Nicolau presents his latest work as the incorporation of a new expressive register, "a click within a parenthesis".

His project, Land, exhibited in 2019/20 at the Bancaja Foundation, (Valencia), reviewed part of his previous production linked to landscape approached from a somewhat abstract perspective. (click) turns the concept around on itself to approach it now from a figurative-realistic vision. However, in doing so, he inverts the terms and makes us see realistic landscapes that are essentially abstractions, fragments of several others, sometimes remote from each other, parts of other landscapes, real or non-existent places, that combine to create other ones.fictitious, dreamlike, but recognizable to our sight as locatable.

Somehow in (click), Sebastián Nicolau revisits his realistic works from the 80s and 90s, approaching them from a new register in which he incorporates two expressive languages: digital and analog. In the words of the artist: “A mix that responds to my interest in recording the expressive possibilities of any means of artistic production previously developed with painting, drawing, sculpture or 3D animation and, in a singular way, photography, which in (click) underlies and intervenes at the service of painting. (...) Illusory landscapes, or rather, landscapes composed of different landscapes that I combine or modify to create new ones that will only exist as pictorial works.»

Sebastián Nicolau, a multidisciplinary artist, has been working since the 1970s, fixing his interest on the relationship between the atmospheric landscape and the architectural, urban and industrial element. Realistic naturalistic landscapes, open fields or iron and glass skylights... From them he would approach through several of his series (Hilvanes, Cartones; Hules, Talleres...) the space of sculpture, video and 3D animation, to return and reverse again the baggage on painting and drawing. A vision of the landscape towards its formal synthesis, shuffling the concepts of reality-fiction, tangibility and representation or reality-abstraction.

In 2018 he published Mercury Between the Fingers (MAKMA editions). A first foray into the world of literature in which he reflects on the concept of the passage of time, creating an autobiographical universe that he somehow visualizes in (click), both through the approaches of the works and their titles.

He has had thirty-seven individual exhibitions, including those held at the Zannettaci Gallery in Geneva, Tamènaga Gallery in Tokyo, Osaka and New York, Trentadue in Milan, Leandro Navarro in Madrid, Alejandro Sales in Barcelona, ​​IVAM, l'Almudí. , Bancaja Foundation or Shiras in Valencia. He has also participated in several editions of national and international fairs such as ARCO, Art Madrid or ESTAMPA as well as innumerable national and international collective or group exhibitions.
His work is present in collections such as the IVAM in Valencia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Mapfre Foundation, and the Banco Sabadell Foundation. The D'Arte Dello Splendore Museum (Italy), the Caja Burgos Contemporary Art Center, the Hortensia Herrero Foundation, Valencia, the Bancaja Foundation, Valencia, the Villafamés Museum in Castellón, the UPV Contemporary Art Collection, the UV Contemporary Art Collection, the Antonio Pérez de Cuenca Foundation, the Martínez Guerricabeitia Collection, Valencia, the Fischer Collection,
among other.

This is how Sara Joudi, artistic director of Shiras, defines the project: “A show of great maturity and elegance, where the artist's experience becomes latent before each work. (click) delves us into the personal nature of the artist using and combining the technique of pencil drawing and the use of new digital technologies that, fused together, have an impact on the viewer's gaze”.

The exhibition can be visited at Shiras Galería until March 22, from Monday to Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.