Peter Nadin on Beekeeping, Image-Making, and the Poetic Resonance of Marks

May 28, 2024

British-American artist Peter Nadin has always been a shapeshifter. He moved to New York from Newcastle in 1976, and immediately became accustomed to the Manhattan downtown art scene. For two years, Nadin ran 84 West Broadway, an experimental exhibition space, from his loft in Tribeca with one of the forebears of Institutional Critique, Christopher D’Arcangelo. He also mingled with fellow conceptualists Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Throughout the 1980s, Nadin, along with his peers, maintained an ephemeral and challenging practice, performing manual labor and taking on corporate jobs in an attempt to blur the distinction between high art and everyday life, critiquing the commodification of artistic labor in an increasingly neoliberal era. During that time, he also published poetry books and maintained a rigorous painterly practice that mediated the limit of abstraction in the midst of a robust discourse that sought to define painting’s revival as a principal medium.

While Nadin’s 1980s paintings, along with the contemporaneous Neo-expressionism, can be read as a reaction against the alleged death of painting declared by conceptual art and minimalism in previous decades, they are much less figurative than products of Neo-expressionism and more philosophically concerned with the nature of mark-making. In 1993, Nadin suddenly dropped out of the commercial art world and moved to a farm in Catskills. He felt the gallery system could not support and sustain his demanding and intensive experimentation in painting as mark-making. For almost two decades, Nadin mastered the art of beekeeping, creating meta-paintings about the practice of image-making on the side.

By Qingyuan Deng
Photographs by Alon Koppel. Courtesy of the artist and Off Paradise, New York.

In the mid 2010s, the art world finally caught up with Nadin and he started showing paintings at commercial galleries again. Recent exhibitions have focused on what Nadin calls “painting from life,” gestural marks about memories of his days in the Catskills and his impressions of the community around him. For his debut exhibition at Off Paradise, a project space run by Paris-born curator Natacha Polaert, Nadin showcased The Distance from a Lemon to Murder, a series of paintings he made during the pandemic shelter-in-place, situated somewhere between the real and the imaginary, about the threat of interpersonal domination lurking beneath the mundanity of the countryside. Nadin’s current exhibition at Off Paradise, The Invisible World, explores the unbridgeable separation between seeing and remembering, leading to incredibly moving moments.

Shall we start with the elephant in the room? You stopped exhibiting paintings formally for many years. What sparked your interest in returning to exhibiting painting in a commercial context?

I stopped exhibiting paintings because the painting that I was doing from the 1990s onwards was outside of the conventions of what we think of as painting, traditionally understood to be the intention of making marks. What interested me was the unintentional mark and resonance of activity, which were areas of exploration that really inform my painting activities. The more recent work I am doing really incorporates all those possibilities and there isn’t anything that’s by design or by necessity excluded from the possibility of mark making. When Natacha invited me to do a show, I agreed to showcase these possibilities.

Adam Installing Utilities in the Garden of Eden Under the Devil’s Fire, 2023

How do your paintings fall outside of the traditional trajectory of painting making or mark making?

Curiously, over the years that I’ve been working, I realized that you can’t really judge what a painting is purely by what it looks like. You can have very unconventional paintings that are actually within the convention of painting. And you can have things that appear to be in a convention of practicality but are quite radical. You can’t always tell. It’s interesting to find out an approach that enables me to understand those differentiations. With those first mark paintings, it was unintentional, and there were no conventions. I didn’t know what was going to happen. When I look back at them, some of them seem quite beautiful, even though I had no intention of making a mark that would have any apparent meaning. Thus, I became interested in if meaning can reside in something that’s entirely unintentional, or if one has to intend to describe something that gives meaning.

And you were showing them in very unconventional settings or places.

I stopped exhibiting my paintings around 1993. I didn’t really have an agenda, I just wanted to explore different things. I began farming and became very interested in beekeeping. A few years later, I went down to Cuba as the US representative to the South American Beekeeping Conference. At the conference, I met a number of artists and curators who share similar ideas about the way agriculture could inform artistic practice. There was no market for contemporary art in Cuba, even though there’s a tremendous cultural heritage. They valued art in a very different way, for its spiritual meaning.

Through a friend working at the Wilfredo Lam Center, I met Hector, a beekeeper. I told Hector I hadn’t really shown anything in many years, because I didn’t really connect with the context. And he said, “Why don’t you do something down here?” That's how I started a painting show in Cuba. The show was met with enthusiasm and traveled around the island through the Center. And then a couple of years later, I did another show that traveled more extensively, it even went down to Cuenca, Equator. What’s wonderful about these shows is that the response was purely about what they meant, what it was, or what I was offering to them, since there’s no commercial engagement.

You made the paintings in this room while you were living in Catskills and they really pay attention to your surroundings and your memory of the environment and the people in your life? How does it feel to paint your life and your immediate circles?

At the end of the day, that's what I know and that’s how my time is spent. And I hope that I give the environment and the people that I represent the due respect, because the people that I see, know, and interact with are a subject so integrated within my life.

When you paint a landscape, they’re citing and constantly responding to so many important art-historical movements. Are you thinking about the history of art you’re a part of, or are you more just thinking about your immediate experiences or your biography when you paint?

It’s all part of the same thing. The experience that one has is going to manifest through movements of the hand and the arm. I approach a painting as if all those possibilities were already there. Sometimes it may have a resonance with some part of our history, and sometimes it may not. But I think if a painting is successful, it should not have subconsciousness. If the subconscious is present, it can interfere with the reading of the painting. I personally just paint hoping that I can give form to experience.

Three Self Portraits and a Ripening Lemon, 2023

Looking East, Seeing West, 2023

The paintings here have this poetic sensibility to them. You’re also a poet. I'm wondering if the two practices ever correlate with each other. Does your poetry nourish your painting, or vice versa?

Yes, they’re very closely related. I think evocation of the word is very close to the mark and the evocation of the mark. I can write poetry because I understand the poetic resonance of words, in the same way as I understand the poetic resonance of marks. The two inform each other without necessarily being bound up by the convention of the sentence, or the convention of the procedure of art making.

Let’s go back in history a little bit. You were a part of the downtown conceptual art collectives The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters. The collective itself was very interested in the circulation of image, information, and language and was producing very different works. The paintings in this room still feel connected to your earlier endeavor, in the sense that these paintings are very much thinking about the instability of memory and its circulation. Could you talk a little bit more about your interest in the porous boundary between self and the world?

It is really true that they are all part of the same inquiry, only the forms it takes are sometimes different. When I started painting when I was nine years old, one of the things that I like about the painted surface is that it can only have two functions. You can either look at it, or if it’s waterproof oil paint, you can use it to patch a roof or put it on the side of a chicken house. In other words, it’s indivisible. What we were doing with The Offices was not indivisible, because it could lead to other possibilities. I didn’t really know if our commitment to engage with the community could lead to some kind of long-term change. It’s an open question, as I’m not trained in those areas. However, I remain very interested in what social change and the method to achieve that might look like. My sense is that we are constantly engaging with perceptual and cognitive information from which one creates the will for transformation. If you want to create a different understanding of the world, you will create different procedures first.

What strikes me is that even though your paintings are so conceptually engaged with ideas of memory and information, it still feels very pleasant to look at them because there’s such a humor to them. What is your relationship to evoking emotions, especially humor, in your approach to paintings?

I think all of this must be present. Humor is such a necessity to create meaning. In a sense, it’s absurd to try to make sense of extremes with only our rational sense. Who would feel obliged to do it? In fact, some of the most profound, beautiful explorations of consciousness relies on humor. Nothing should be excluded from the beginning.

Sharkey’s Donkey Watching a Fish (A Migration of Golden Orfe), 2023

What are you looking forward to next?

I’m beginning to work on a new body painting. It often begins with a word or with a thought, a sense that there may be something that will light a little fire within the world. I don’t know if this little flame will develop into a conflagration. But if there is something, normally it takes about five years to be fully revealed.

Time feels so essential to your practice. You are often intentionally slowing down the temporality of experiencing your paintings.

Maybe in 15 or 20 years I can begin to see if I wish to paint in a certain different way. I can always begin again.

The Programmer, 2022.

The Secret Wedding of the Invisible Man, 2022.

Art

The Mayrit Bienal Exhibits An Animated Madrid

Wet Dreams follows up on the 2022 edition of Mayrit, The Drowned Worlds, evidently appropriate themes for a biennial that takes its title from the 9th century name for Madrid which translates to “place of many waterways”. Unlike many biennials, which work to distinguish themselves thematically from their predecessors, Otero Verzier opted to build from the framework of the prior installment: a clever move that gestures to the priority of knowledge-building, social relation, and the biennial’s longer-term ambition to “position the Spanish capital as a creative focal point for emerging talent.”

Mayrit’s Curatorial Director, artist, and designer Joel Blanco, helps execute this vision. He notes that “the first edition was mostly for ourselves, the less established designers from Madrid who just wanted to have fun by creating their own events. We are gradually reaching a wider audience without forgetting about the independent, less mainstream proposals. Our approach was to fertilize the creative ground here by helping creatives develop their practice without the constraints of profit.”

Mayrit, which often takes on the celebratory and social spirit of a festival, is anchored by two notably strong institutional exhibitions: Wet Dreams, the title show at Madrid’s Centro Centro art center curated by Otero Verzier, and Espejito Espejito (“Mirror Mirror”) curated by architecture collective Grandeza Studio at the Museo de América at the western edge of the city center. Other venues, like the Bate Social Store which houses the Bienal’s design shop—a curated storefront with design objects selected from an open call — and the National Museum of Decorative Arts, which hosts Materia Computada — an exhibition curated by HyperStudio — atomize Mayrit’s itinerary across the city. “Mayrit has seeded many collaborations, and we are reaching places that were previously outside the scope of current design practice,” says Blanco.

In Wet Dreams, Otero Verzier gathers an impressive array of work spanning film, industrial design, research, photography, and architecture, presenting contributions from peers, friends, allies, and a few students she has recently taught at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Artist collective La Cuarta Piel contributed documentation of their 2022 durational performance, “Spa Profundo,” in which they immersed performers in a hedonistic deluge of viscous marble extraction waste from a mine in the Vinalopó River valley near Alicante. A sample of their white mud pool inhabits the gallery in front of photos of limbs writhing in apparent delight: a visceral, if wry, critique of the slow violence of extractive capitalism. Models of Andres Jaque’s 2015 MoMA PS1 pavilion, the water-filtering “COSMO,” and the recent “Rambla Climate House,” designed with Miguel Mesa de Castillo, bring to the show an optimistic exuberance that points to architecture’s capacity to perform instrumentally at the scale of daily life. And in “Atlas de Plantas de Cuartos Oscuros en la Ciudad de Barcelona,” Pol Esteve Castelló presents floor plans of fifteen dark rooms in Barcelona with unlikely precision: sites of pleasure where social exchange often accompanies fluid exchange.

The show brings together a generation of new thinkers with urgent political and social preoccupations that reflect Madrid’s increasing centrality in design discourse. In recent years, Spanish designers have built an influential presence in American and European schools of architecture (Jaque, for instance, is the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning). Only a few years ago, both Leiro and Otero Verzier were both living abroad — Leiro in New York and Otero Verzier in The Netherlands—and recently have returned to Spain, setting up in Madrid. Grandeza Studio (Amaia Sánchez-Velasco, Jorge Valiente Oriol, and Gonzalo Valiente Oriol), curators of Espejito Espejito, work between Madrid and Sydney. They typify the far-reaching interest in the country’s creative vanguard, and the way it is gathering anew in the country’s capital, fostering conversations that expand beyond conventional discourse.

Espejito Espejito, photographed by Asier Rua

Espejito Espejito develops from ideas articulated by Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato, and from Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano’s argument that the very idea of Europe is predicated on the European “invention” (rather than discovery) of America, and its subsequent colonization. Grandeza Studio invites artists—many of them from Central and South America and their diaspora communities—whose work uses the notion of the mirror to “redirect its distorting power.” That this takes place in Madrid’s Museo de América, what the curators call a “historical guarantor and archival reservoir of the Eurocentric autofiction,” is noteworthy. The museum’s new director, Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos, was appointed in 2023 and has declared his ambition to decolonize its collection. Espejito Espejito is housed in a gallery that previously held an exhibition titled El Hombre (first installed in 1994), and vestiges of it remain in a savvy curatorial move that point to the discursive distance between old guard and new.

Some interventions from the show’s artists have further highlighted precisely this sort of friction. Earlier this year, Colombia’s Minister of Culture made a formal request to repatriate the Quimbaya artifacts—a part of the Museo’s collection—which has so far been declined by the Spanish government. Colombian artist Juan Covelli synthesized prospective new artifacts using a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on images of the Quimbaya Treasure in an attempt at symbolic repatriation. Next to the vitrine housing Covelli’s work is a wall label authored by the Museo, clarifying that the participating artists’ views “do not necessarily represent the opinion of the institution,” and inviting visitors to see the actual relics on the building’s second floor.

“Espejito Espejito” includes vital contributions from Martine Gutierrez (“HIT MOVIE: Vol. 1”), Tatyana Zambrano and Hernán Rodriguez (“Banana Valley”), and Naomi Rincón Gallado (“Sangre Pesada”), organized in an improvised scenography composed of scaffolding and silver curtains devised by the show’s curators. The exhibition takes big risks that pay off. It is radical in the way that it works from within and alongside a museum grappling with its colonial legacy live, out in the open. Perhaps it is through dissident guest programming like this that the institution can advance beyond its own burdensome history. On a quiet day, I even observed the gallery docents playing “UNKRNS: Beyond the Entrepreneurial Spell,” a video game made by artists Diego Morera and Sebastián Lambert. Indeed, “Mayrit aspires to build more bridges with Spanish-speaking countries to give them a platform here as well,” says Blanco.

Tapiz, tapiz, 1.000 millones, please (2024) by Virginia Sosa Santos, Sebastián Lambert and Diego Morera & Banana Valley (2022) by Tatyana Zambrano and Hernán Rodríguez

Miguel Leiro, Mayrit’s Founder and Director, has cited La Movida Madrileña, the explosive creative scene of the 1980s that followed Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, as a reference for the milieu he’s interested in cultivating now. In that time, figures like Pedro Almodovar and Rossy da Palma emerged alongside new cultural dynamics and amidst a new openness around sex and glamour. Mayrit’s programming subtly nods to that moment every now and then. Its opening night party (co-organized by the local music incubator Los Invernaderos) was hosted at Sala El Sol, a venue where Almodovar and bands like Radio Futura would hang out and play. Leiro’s father, a sculptor who emerged from the same artistic movement as Marina Otero Verzier’s (who is a painter), would spend time there in the 1980s as well, descending its red spiral staircase as a new crowd did for Mayrit’s inauguration this spring. As this latest crop of young madrileños danced into the late hours of the night, sweat and drink perhaps conjured yet more novel visions of a cultural scene emerging anew. Evidently, currents still flow in Madrid’s underground.

Wet Dreams runs until August 25th at Centro Centro. Espejito Espejito runs until November 24th at the Museo de América. The full program for the 2024 Mayrit Bienal can be found at mayrit.org.

Art

The Artist and the Cigar Box: Civil Pleasures

June 14, 2024

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, a chain-smoker himself, once declared cigar smoking a manifestation of oral fixation, a line of thinking echoed by Emma Stern, painter of 3D-modeled hot girls, who told me during the opening night of The Artist and the Cigar Box last Thursday that she’s a firm believer in the enduring sex appeal of cigars. The Artist and the Cigar Box is a benefit exhibition curated by collector and owner of downtown fixture Fun City Tattoo Maxx Starr. When a cigar-loving artist friend told Maxx of the long history of printing customized art on cigar boxes here in Lower East Side dating back to the 1860s, Maxx was instantly inspired. He approached his long-time friend Sean Dorsey, co-founder of Civil Pleasures, a premium New York-based cigar brand hand-crafted in Nicaragua, which is making cigar-smoking cool again.

Commissioning sixteen artist friends (ranging from art world superstars such as Stern and Marika Thunder to skateboarding legend Mark Gonzales) to turn a Civil Pleasures cigar box into a painting or a sculptural assemblage, Maxx and Sean then contacted Pali Kashi of Europa, who gladly agreed to host the benefit exhibition at her Chinatown space. In line with Maxx and Sean’s commitment to fostering culture, all proceeds will go to Harlem-based non-profit Artistic Noise which empowers underserved youth through art. The opening at Europa and the afterparty at Le Bain are your classic beginning-of-summer rendezvous, where many of downtown's pleasure-seekers could be spotted.

By Qingyuan Deng
Photography by Ruvan Wijesooriya, courtesy of Civil Pleasures.

Check out photos from the opening night below and put your bids in here. The Artist and the Cigar Box online auction.

The Artist and the Cigar Box is on view online through June 30th.

Art

Charles Hascoët Seeks Salvation Through Nostalgia

June 14, 2024

A small portrait of Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk watches benevolently on high over viewers entering Kobayashi Maru at Perrotin, the first New York solo show by French painter Charles Hascoët. The portrait stands apart in more ways than one — it’s also the only black and white painting amongst the rich hues of Hascoët’s latest series, all produced in his Ridgewood studio over the past six months, further underscoring the work’s pointed nod to the premise. Kobayashi Maru is a crew exercise from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In the 42 years since the film’s debut, “Kobayashi Maru” has come to mean a lose-lose situation within the popular lexicon.

Hascoët chose the title because, as he told me at Perrotin, “Whatever we do, we're fucked.” Captain Kirk bent the rules to achieve a win-win, but for Hascoët, the way out is through dreams.

By Vittoria Benzine
Images by Guillaume Ziccarelli, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, New York.

Kobayashi Maru touches upon climate change, toxic grind culture, and mass media, all through Hascoët’s personal experience. The first chamber in the three-room show centers on his earliest influences: vats of Listerine, recognizable through their iconic shapes alone, alongside PS1 controllers and CK One, that ubiquitous, idealistic unisex scent. Lemons shout out Edouard Manet and echo tennis balls, a nod to Hascoët’s pup and Perrotin’s unofficial mascot, Simone. Three sharks prove that Hascoët, and society at large, have conquered the fears fostered by films like Jaws. Collective maturity has taught us that sharks are critical to earth’s ecosystem.

James T. Kirk, 2024

But Hascoët himself is the main character in the dream sequences that play out on larger canvases across the next two main rooms. In “The Waves,” Hascoët apathetically maneuvers raging seas in a dinghy, engrossed in his purple Gameboy. Those in the know will note he’s playing Pokemon, based on the yellow cartridge. Nearby, the show’s titular work depicts him sleepless, doom scrolling in a bed that straddles the tides and sands of a beach while a far off volcano erupts. The picture’s loose brushstrokes, underscored throughout by improbable pinks, contrast another self portrait across the way titled “Self Portrait with Brachiosaurus,” this time painted using a mirror rather than memory — with defined features and a rational color palette.

The real and imagined intertwine throughout. On walks to his studio, Hascoët discovered a store selling National Geographics for $1. Red pandas, dinosaurs, and polar bears have since entered his paintings, each bringing their own meaning. The advent of social media accounts attracting eyes with cute creatures has empowered red pandas to become the patron saint of a generation starved for joy. In “Red panda vortex,” this “kind of a new cat,” as Hascoët puts it, lounges in a magnolia tree inspired by springtime in Bushwick, on a branch jutting out over a water feature referencing Hiroshige. Elsewhere, Listerine makes one final appearance next to a red maple from his mother’s home, reimagined as a bonsai — or maybe it’s just a really big bottle of mouthwash. All depends on how you see it, much like the celestial bodies in “The Wave,” “Shiatsu,” and more resemble both the sun and moon. Hascoët’s not inclined to discern for you.

The Waves, 2024

Shiatsu, 2024

Ambivalence and hauntology are the moment. As millennials have started entering their peak purchasing power and professional influence, 90s culture has proliferated contemporary art. It’s not a fad, but a mainstay — as emphasized by the art historical traditions Hascoët has translated such relics through, and rendered them alongside. He sympathizes with the desire for comfort in these uncertain times, but believes such motifs belie a deeper shift. “In the late 19th century, Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’” the artist mused. “At the same time, Baudelaire came up with the idea that if God is dead, there is something to replace it. Why not poetry?”

Take it from both world wars — that didn’t work. “Then pop culture came along in the second part of the 20th century,” Hascoët said. “Poetry was quickly replaced.” Now, pop culture’s been used up. Rather than new stories, there’s a new Star Wars every six months. Kobayashi Maru doesn’t propose a solution, but honors Hascoët's diversions, like Polish-American techno DJ Bogdan Raczynski, who appears in a “Rave ‘Till You Cry” t-shirt. “I think it's a good way to implement poetry,” Hascoët remarked. “He would rip your mind open and then pour in some nice tunes.”

Cottage-core, 2024

Memes appear too. “Cottage-core” depicts Hascoët in his take on the “stop glamorizing the grind” meme. In the same room, Hascoët ponders his orb, right by another luminous scene based on the time Hascoët took Simone to a witch in Brittany to help her recover from getting spayed.

In fact, Hascoët’s grandmother was one of those witches, but when his father and uncle chose practical paths, the intergenerational chain shattered. Hascoët’s picked it back up again — and not without perfunctory tribulations. He failed at his first attempt to get into the École des Beaux-Arts, and heeded his father’s recommendation to try law school. Hascoët dropped out after two years, enraging his dad, then got into the École des Beaux-Arts courtesy of his renewed vigor for painting. Kobayashi Maru commemorates a decade since his graduation.

Hascoët believes the personal branding that characterizes Instagram and TikTok means the self will perhaps become society’s new god. His work has seized on that idea too, whether he wholly realizes it or not. While alchemizing disparate inputs like magazines, photos from friends, and his own observations, Hascoët only lets a painting leave his studio if he feels like it has soul. Interestingly, he says that without an element of self-portraiture that has nothing to do with the imagery itself, an artwork reads as vain. Even though he doesn’t appear in “Paleo-core,” the last work he made for this show, Hascoët sees himself in it. Whether he’s the T-Rex pissed off about the end of the world, the worried Brachiosaurus — or both — he still hasn’t decided. It’s up to you.

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