Artists & Works

STYLE: New Image
glass

Nicholas Africano, first associated with the New Image painters of the late 70s, became known in the 80s for his paintings and works on paper which featured small, isolated figures. Africano began exploring the sculptural possibilities of these figures first in clay, and then in glass, working at such major glass ateliers as Pilchuck in Seattle. He has since been refining these figures, adding different pigments and finishes.

The little figures are in some ways "everymen," although they also reflect the artist's personal experience, even episodes from his childhood. They have a universal, anti-heroic stance, enacting metaphors for the individual's helplessness in the face of contemporary society. This theme of anonymity in a mass-media dominated universe is common to other artists of the 80s, including Ellen Carey, David Salle, Keith Haring, and Jedd Garet.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Lisa Lyons, Nicholas Africano: Innocence and Experience, Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, 1/91
"Nicholas Africano entered the art world through the back door. As an undergraduate at Illinois State University in the early 1970s he majored in English, fully intending to pursue a career as a writer. His writing style was spare and economical...he began to supplant verbal images with small illustrations within the text...Eventually, he determined that he could express himself more directly as a visual artist, and he enrolled in the university's painting program in 1973. It was a time when the figure and emotional content were reasserting themselves...Among Africano's early efforts are sequences of narrative paintings in which diminutive figures, ...enact spare stories based on the artist's life...Africano himself admits to being troubled by his painterly invasions of his own and others' privacy...he stopped using autobiographical material in 1980....Over the years, the struggle for self-revelation has remained a central theme in Africano's work...For one, Africano has moved away from simple storytelling to a more dynamic and improvisational use of narrative. Rather than illustrating a single tale, he now uses multiple sources—literary, musical, and perceptual—as his points of departure...The movement...is...emotional, from inner to outer reality and back again...he has pushed his narratives into three dimensions in the group of tabletop figurines he has produced since 1985 and the life-size nudes that he has created in the past year...Africano admires...William Blake...Blakean, too, is the central role that writing has played in the development of Africano's recent work. Each morning he makes entries in his journal, and the emotions and images described in these musings resonate in the paintings and sculptures on view here...If there were a story, Africano says, it would have to do with 'the loss of innocence and the acceptance of that loss. Most of all, the impossibility of innocence and the futility of experience is what interests me right now.'...'I am only a little less bewildered by life's common ironies, but a kind of integration is occurring within my own life that I hope will reveal itself in my art as well. It is a harsh movement, not poetic in its progress. My art will speak with a quieter voice, and seek that strength which equals poise between the truth and the lie'...The blatant and high-strung tensions that characterize so many of his previous creations have been replaced in his new works by a subtler, if not less disturbing mood, suggesting the depth of understanding and knowledge that comes with maturity...Africano's real genius is to create images that, no matter how personal their significance, burrow beneath our consciousness and call forth a host of universal associations...It is a voice filled with pain and passion..."

Herbert Muschamp, Greater Expectations, Holly Solomon catalog, 10/86
"...these new paintings and sculptures by Nicholas Africano are not enigmas. They are invitations...They meet us at the retina and beckon our minds to join them there...The forms are Africano's but the stories are ours...Africano's figures are readymades for our thoughts. They come drifting into our contemporary life on small rafts of art, conscious of the politics as well as the aesthetics of reception, trusting that our intentional and pathetic fallacies will rescue them."