Nick Mauss – Answering a glance glance up

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NICK MAUSS

Answering a glance, glance up

Nick Mauss works at the interstices between drawing, installation, and writing, as a way to generate a passage between mediums, affects, and technique. While visually Mauss' approach is said to traverse figuration and abstraction, it is more likely that it suggests a third way, a poetics in which these categories become fraught.

Blank spaces and frames reserve areas where images have already been or have yet to appear. The silence of these spaces evokes an anticipation and repression of images which are caught on the surface of the work in a stage of becoming. The blank spaces can only be filled by desire or with bodies - of the viewer confronting the traces of the hand. "Special effects": flares, blurs, hazes, veils, and blind spots crossing the field of vision emphasize a conflicted access to the congealing picture from within the work as well as from the outside. Yet there is a sense that these various stuttering drawings glancing across different materials are looking for the drawing that is already in the space, "written in the wind", or in particular gestures and movements.

Recently, Mauss has been working with glaze painted on ceramic tablets. The process--from painting through firing--is necessarily "blind", as the colors, intensities, and layering transform rather unpredictably. This blindness inserts a gap into painting, which also becomes a way of recording an undecideability of the image, where the delay in time between the making of the mark and its fired visibility allows for a simultaneous immediacy and slowness. As Mauss has said of his drawings, "Weeks, or even years, after beginning a drawing, I might return to it and not recognize it anymore, or know how to relate to what is already there, so then I work with it as something alien. Eventually as the marks cohere on the page, I like the sense that they seem to have been applied from the front and from behind, like a memory that can't remember."

At Indipendenza Studio, Mauss will present new works in ceramic, sculpture, and drawings on paper and fabric.