Nick Dawes creates complex color arrangements with fluid forms and thus pursues a new quality of painterly abstraction. The ostensibly impulsive painterly gestures of his
paintings are, however, achieved by an exact plan that leaves almost nothing to chance. The artist distils abstract forms from the formal particularities of road signs or
other sign-like quotidian objects, which he then captures as pencil drawings and transfers to the canvas with thinned poured oil paint. In a controlled way, the paint is
poured onto and soaked by unprimed canvases laying on the floor or propped against the wall. The artist succeeds in steering the liquid paint into the previously
sketched forms by moving the canvas. In this long, almost meditational process, the next color will only be applied after the already painted layers are dry. Amorphous,
seemingly organic fields of color, overlayed and overlapping, emerge in this manner, and yet they are always clearly separated. From a purely material perspective, the works of Nick Dawes are merely two-dimensional surfaces. He does not apply the color on the canvas; rather he soaks the fabric with color, which blends with the base to form a new unity. The separate fields of color overlap and interpenetrate each other and thus suggest a sequentiality in both space and time. The initially applied color is also in the imagined space of the
painting in the rear and disappears partially or entirely behind subsequent layers of color. The fluidity and process-like quality enable space for reflection on the historicity of the act of painting and of life itself. Every color field on a painting by Nick Dawes is, therefore, both: The result of a composition based on sketches and visible trace of a past painterly action. However, above all, his paintings are literal abstractions that transform what has been seen to painting, which develops a life of its own, freed from the duty to represent something. The functionality of the real object that gave the artist the impulse for his painting is suspended. The painting follows only its self-imposed, art inherent laws: color, form, harmony, dissonance.
Nick Dawes lives and works in London. He completed his BA of Fine Arts at the Brighton Polytechnic in 1992, after completing a foundation course at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology. In 2006 Nick Dawes was nominated for the Celeste Art Prize and his work was shown in numerous exhibitions, among others the Cell Project Space in London, Gallery Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Galerie Kornfeld‘s project space 68projects in Berlin, and last year in the US at the Expo Chicago and Untitled Miami. His works are part of many public and private collections in Germany, Europe and abroad, among others in the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, which recently acquired a large work of the artist for its collection.