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Nils Nova
FACING THE SUN (Face au soleil)
September 20, 2021 to Mars 19, 2022
Opening times: 24/24, from Mondays to Sundays
Facing the Sun
A small oil painting on wood, painted on both sides, stands like a sculpture in the Kunsthalle. On the one hand, the painting is strongly geometric, offering a minimalist and abstract pictorial language, but on the other hand, it is also a figurative image that evokes a bright and colorful space.
On the lower floor of the Kunsthalle, a « memory painting » is installed, as a landscape. The canvas, covered with overlapping drops and patches of color, was created over a long period of time as an « echo of the image » on the upper floor.
Nils Nova was born in 1968 in Sant Ana, El Salvador. In 1981 he moved to Switzerland with his Swiss mother and Salvadorian father. After being trained as boat builder, he studied from 1997 to 2001 at the Lucerne University of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in Lucerne.
“With my paintings, I try to create a kind of meta mirror, a projection surface where everything becomes possible, and where one is facing both the inner and the outside world.
Today, our lives are flooded with images. Every day we swipe and click our way through thousands of images, creating some kind of indistinct noise in our heads. My paintings deal with this medial overexposure and how images are superimposed onto one another. Paradoxically perhaps, the daily flood of information also brings about a new kind of calm. Something similar happens in my painting process. If I am restless and start to paint, I try to reach a meditative state while painting. However, there is always the possibility of failing. It is out of this tension between the possibility of failing and the attempt to achieve my inner calm that my paintings are born. I often lay a canvas on the floor underneath the canvases I paint. While I am painting, fresh paint drips from my brush leaving stains on the canvas on the floor. These stains multiply painting after painting. In this way the canvas on the floor becomes a mirrored image of my paintings – A mirror, so to speak, of my painted meta mirrors.”
Excerpt from the short-film Inside Nils Nova by Christof Schuerpf (2021)
