EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

James Nares, the current talk of Manhattan (in Spring 2013), has an astonishing video playing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Street. Go see it if you can. Here, though, I want to discuss some of his recent paintings, a series of seemingly abstract designs known as Road Paint.

Yes, they look like the lines down the center of a road and tire marks too thereby suggesting a journey which, in his case, must be spiritual. However, as paint, they are clearly self-referential and uncannily resemble a painter's brushstokes. What will not be noticed, though, in Broadway Rap for instance, at left, is the presence of the artist's initial, N. See the diagram below.

Click next thumbnail to continue







 

In Burn Rubber, another in the series, Nares includes both initials J and N. (Again, see diagram below.) However, in twisting them out of shape, they are clearly mental images which, in art, are traditionally fractured, twisted, melting (as in Salvador Dali) or bent out of shape.¹

Nares' Manhattan gallery comments that these paintings are the "result of a completely new technique…...This unique practice seeks to capture movement’s own moment of creation, its own primal genesis."² In his mind, of course.

Click next thumbnail to continue





 

In Blacktop, yet another paint reference related to the road, J and N appear again.

Click next thumbnail to continue







 

In this final example the J and the N are fused together in the lower right corner where signatures traditionally go: the leg of the J here being the right-hand upright of the N.

Art always refers to contemporary culture as in the title of this image, How's My Driving? At least in the United States, that phrase is seen on the back of trucks  everywhere and metaphorically suggests How's My Painting? Are my lines making it? This conception of art's construction in the mind links Nares' practice to centuries of tradition which, in essence, never changes because Wisdom never does. It is eternal. Nevertheless Nares' compositions are the signs of a self-inquiring mind and of the artist's own intense focus on the present moment of existence, the moment the art was created.