Candace Nycz
October 5 - November 9, 2024
25 years ago abstract painting was seen as something serious. It was understood through the radical ideas of Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, to name a few. One notable change in art over the last quarter century is the muting of that radicality, less by what painters were doing and more by what the audience understood. Monochrome painting which had stood as the outer limit of the medium’s possibilities, now functions as a color swatch in an interior designer’s palette. Nothing could seem more innocuous. As non-representational painting’s political ambition is hidden in a thicket of historical knowledge navigable by fewer and fewer people, such works can become expensive decorations on a big wall. People are often content with abstract paintings that look good and produce no friction.
Not so for Candace Nycz. A painter who began her practice in earnest when abstract painting still felt like a form of resistance, she proceeded from that position to make paintings with no interest in being pleasant. Nycz thinks pretty things are delightful, to be sure. She just isn’t interested in making paintings that way. While she rightly takes the idea of radicality with a grain of salt at this late historical moment, she does want her paintings to be a little bit difficult.
In this context difficult means that the paintings feel unlubricated. You can feel every bit of them, all the dry brushwork, the hot color, the itchy surfaces and bumpy edges. They are also slow moving. Like Titian’s late paintings done in white, black, ochre and venetian red (an analog to the four humors, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood) these works proceed from a simplification to the basic elements of the world we live in. Her palette is reduced to magenta, yellow, blue and black, the elemental colors of analog image reproduction. From here, bit by bit, a world gets made. The result is a full color image that shows how it is made from its constituent parts.
We live in a moment where we all watch mediocre “prestige” TV that is familiar and anaesthetic. We call things great that are actually merely reassuring and don’t ask too much of us. Nycz’s paintings are built as a retort to this contemporary mode of culture ingestion. Her paintings demand slow looking and aren’t really tasteful. Instead they give back the viewer’s work in the form of the stimulation to be found in things we don’t always agree with, challenges, surprises, and the pleasure of stretching our sensibility.
Candace Nycz was born in South Amboy, NJ. She holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA. She has shown internationally and in the US, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Claremont Graduate University Gallery, Claremont, CA, Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles and The Art Gallery of Calgary. She has been covered in The Los Angeles Times, Artforum.com, and the Boston Globe. Nycz lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. This is her first solo exhibition.
