Santa Monica
If Patrick Nickell were a writer, his arena would be neither poetry nor prose, but stream-of-consciousness. Using a vocabulary of wire, plaster, and paint, he realizes a hybrid, chimerical territory consisting of partly fictional, partly poetic, quasi-realist objects made credible through their irregular, oddly elegant surfaces and idiosyncratic imagery. Nickell’s objects, though they share the generalized traits of Modernist abstraction, contain so extensive a range of meanings that they can’t be reduced to such a clear-cut category. They establish a cartoony collaboration between the abstract and the figurative, their abject forms bearing close resemblance to human figures, a nimals, and plants. The majority of them are resolutely anti-decorative, floppy, and expressive, all seemingly caught mid-gesture. Nickell’s recent show was divided into two rooms…see the entire review in the print version of June’s Sculpture magazine.
