Artist: Nicolas Roggy
Exhibition title: Autre Nouvelle
Curated by: Camille Besson & Haydée Marin Lopez
Venue: Café des Glaces, Tonnerre, France
Date: November 5, 2022 – February 4, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Café des Glaces, Tonnerre
Greying teeth dent the Cash mirror
There is an embarrassing pattern into which a critic can fall that, in a moment overstepped certainty, can work not to illuminate or contextualize the practice of an artist but, in reverse, to dessicate away from a viewer the very puzzle that a work presents. To acknowledge a depth of texture without rendering it programmatically explicit requires delicate habits. Some might argue that to refuse the expository positioning describes aspects of skepticism towards enlightened transparency in the fabrication of a public sphere. While the boundaries of address within the work and the boundaries of its distributed description are not the same thing, a theft can take place where the writing manifests a false familiarity that extorts from the viewer their experience of unknowing and giving them more simply a pre-digested program of legibility and appreciation. This acknowledged, the interior world’s of artists are private and often labyrinthian and extricated from the domains of averageness, an element of technical exegesis can be required to situate the very specific and coded materials they produce.
This was my dilemma when I noticed two vices attaching two aluminum beams laying upon the floor. Both the floor and the moment were specific in manners this text will extrapolate. Having written extensively upon things of no particular correlation to this context, my time was expiring and I was looking for a marginally more coherent place to begin this text from. While I had written numerous topographically oriented vocabularies and some poetically eschewed texts, each time I felt my conjectures resolving towards a coherence with the exhibition, a deepening dissatisfaction returned to me. Framed between the panes of a double glazed window, I felt myself within a prison of service.
The simplicity of the viced beams spoke to me about something subtending the core of the exhibition which in the texture of self-effacing inexpressiveness, I was finding myself insufficiently demure to describe. Perhaps this is not true, but the assembled aspect of four conjoined things presented itself to display something rudimentary and not-to-be-taken-for-granted, and which, without ornament, held something poetic to the level of mechanical function. To enter the commentary of a Hollywood image from the perspective of a carpenter or key grip would be estranging to the norms of a critical audience. It was this sense that held for me a sudden and salient resonance.
To destabilize defacto assumptions about painting has been one motif within the work of Nicolas Roggy. Beginning from the primary materials of latticed aluminum brought me the question of whether six or four paintings hang upon the walls of of Cafe des glace’s second story gallery. Placed atop and amid both windows and mirrors, two or four surfaces loom heavily as a aesthetic proposition. Two other works are present in more gentle manners but these works that announce themselves currently upon the limit of imbrication, sets a strong disruption to the room. The room is large and grants plenty of distances from which to engage the work. But in their consumption obstacles and impediments have been brought into the interpretive field. While the experience of this is easily naturalized into a private mannerism of a looking subject, to describe the specificity of these deformations is difficult. Where a median seam offers each work their cohesion, two interior support beams have been left exposed to suspend the works’s sutured integration. The work could be sufficient as a sculptures, detouring the specifications of artist and crafts person but to the volumetrics of their impasse, they continue as paintings, as surfaces inscribed within/into the modulations of imageness.
In these works, Nicolas Roggy places funniness into fissure between representation and recognizability. As a viewer, one might register certain shapes to congress in the semblance a boot, but upon the confirmation of this projection, one’s pseudo-factual symbolic sense is confronted with secondary problematics such as what significances one should ascribe to the large river-ish field that defines its toe. With their foundation-at-kilter that secondary and tertiary meaning foment not with meaning but in parabolic simultaneity. There is an open algebra to this architecture where gesturally evocative brush stokes elide to state equally a river of spawning salmon beneath a constructivistic red carpet and an embattled grammar of painterly red herrings. Where duplication evades replication, slow deliberations of evidence besets ones to a muddled subject and an extensive puzzle.
– Willie Brisco
Nicolas Roggy, Autre Nouvelle, 2022, exhibition view, Café des Glaces, Tonnerre
Nicolas Roggy, Autre Nouvelle, 2022, exhibition view, Café des Glaces, Tonnerre
Nicolas Roggy, Autre Nouvelle, 2022, exhibition view, Café des Glaces, Tonnerre
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 120 x 143 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Autre Nouvelle, 2022, exhibition view, Café des Glaces, Tonnerre
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments on aluminum, 240 x 214 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 530 x 234 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, (detail), 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 530 x 234 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, (detail), 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 530 x 234 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Autre Nouvelle, 2022, exhibition view, Café des Glaces, Tonnerre
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 530 x 234 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, (detail), 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 530 x 234 cm
Nicolas Roggy, Sans titre, (detail), 2022, gesso, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, glycero paint on aluminum, 530 x 234 cm
