Nicole Mauser

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.nicolemauser.com

City / State: Chicago, IL

Through painting I explore the empirical nature of knowledge, inscribed through and by the body. I use abstraction to break down distinctions between system and intuition, space and light, abjection and desire. I am drawn to abstraction because of its ability to slip into surrounding territories of figuration and spatial illusion. In these painting modalities I seek to create a tension between the materiality of painting and the image. When a stain becomes a trompe l’oeil shadow, or drips become hard–edge vibrations, the painting arrives at a threshold. Trespassing visual and art-historical modes makes the painting process itself a search for form and meaning, repeated by the viewer. Compressions of time and space, along with accumulations of texture and touch, constitute the composition. The picture is thus an index of a deliberative process structured to derail somewhere between point A and B. Derailments and erasures are generative failures, incorporated to become traces and veils of space that billow forward and recede. This aesthetic isn’t transcendent, but intricate and corporeal. Ideally, the works are seductive even in their abjection.