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Nicolas Party
HEADS AND CAVE (Têtes et Grotte)
June 22 to September 19, 2021
Opening times: 24/24, from Mondays to Sundays
Six heads and a blue cave
Text by Nicolas Party
The six heads don’t have any particular expressions and feel unhuman, each head only staring at the gaze of the heads placed in front of it. The appearance of the heads echoes two distinctive times in western culture: on one hand, the faces suggested the classic Greek sculpture esthetic, where proportion and lines are idealized to create an unrealistic portrait. On the other hand, the heads point to the present time and to our way of transforming the human face through digital photo filters, make-up as well as plastic surgery. Comparable to the inaccessible idea of beauty by the Greek, our modern way to transform the esthetic of our appearance constantly seems to be inaccessible.
The painting of the blue cave is based on an imaginary deeply rooted in various civilizations and cultures. The cave, the formal archetype of the maternal womb, harkens back to the idea of the origins of life as well as of sensible appearances, according to the Platonic allegory of the cave. Grottoes, in turn, are the sites where the earliest records of artistic expression by humans can be found.
Nicolas Party (*born in Lausanne in 1980) is based in New York. He studied at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne in Switzerland before receiving his MFA from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland.
Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Among other mediums, Party also creates sculptures such as painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome. His brightly-colored androgynous figures vary in scale from the handheld to the monumental.
The artist’s childhood in Villette (Lavaux, Switzerland) imprinted upon him an early fascination with landscape and the natural world, and the influence of his native country places Party firmly within the trajectory of central European landscape painting. Points of reference in his work include celebrated 19th-century Swiss artists Félix Vallotton, Ferdinand Hodler and Hans Emmenegger.
Nicolas Party has a current exhibition at MASI in Lugano, Switzerland and forthcoming one at Le Consortium in Dijon, France.
