CHARLIE SMITH LONDON
336 Old St, London ECV1 9DR
Friday 15 April - Saturday 14 May 2016
CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to present Gavin Nolan’s
third one-person exhibition at the gallery.
Nolan’s recent paintings depict versions of historical
figures. Combining hyper-realism with abstraction and mark making, his mostly
intimate oil paintings reveal the heroic and fragile nature of the subjects and
meditate on creativity, language, legacy and obsolescence. Focusing on iconic
20th century figures of note, Nolan’s current work examines his own
relationship with the past. His interest in the inception of political,
cultural and intellectual movements leads to an examination of their subsequent
effects; and the echoes of an individual’s thoughts and actions that have
moulded the modern period.
Pictorial content and abstraction vie for supremacy in
these paintings where the hyper-real masquerades as fact and the abstract plays
the role of the unknown or intangible. Displaying an exceptional facility for
handling both tendencies, Nolan asserts via painterly language that historical
truth is elusive and information is filtered. Engaging with this slippage,
Nolan seeks to remove the depiction of a subject from the reality of the
original. The painting as object becomes its own peculiar, temporal fact.
By imagining characteristics and simultaneously projecting
himself onto his subjects, Nolan suggests the paintings serve as meditations on
the self as well as those depicted. In combination with a restricted palette
that hints at nostalgic recollection, and by referencing his own early work,
the figures inhabiting this collection might be phantasmal or undead - haunting
our present as they fade in and out of time and being.
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