Nick GossMargaritas at the Mall

In his new paintings Nick Goss seems to be aiming at the mode of memory – at the way in which, at any given moment, it inevitably contains more than one place and more than one logic. On the other hand, it is easy to recognise in Nick Goss’s works the logic of modernist collage, or the Cubist compulsion to cut things apart. In his painting “Last of England” a cluster of people is wedged onto the canvas in a manner reminiscent of the era of the Weimar Republic, as though seen in a cracked mirror – a bag, a scarf, something carried under the arm are all parts on one and the same flat plane. Looked at for longer, the effect is not one of estrangement or disorientation, as it is with Höch’s surreal assemblages or Kirchner’s brittle street scenes. I see the people in Nick Goss’s new paintings rather as strangers in whom someone quietly believes, strangers endowed with dignity. The fragmentation in these works might thus be better understood as a kind of sampling, as in music. There is humour in this distancing, as there is in Goss’s paintings, and much more lies hidden behind what we see, however flat or shabby or futile it may appear. It was fun at the bowling alley, until it simply wasn’t any more … or was it?

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 4/9 – 16/10/2021