NICOLAS PARTY (B. 1980)

“Colour is very much like music. The tiniest adjustment on the piano chords makes an immense difference. A drop of yellow on that blue, and the whole melody changes. ” -Nicolas Party

Nicolas Party’s Still Life is anything but still — it is instead a traditional artistic subject enlivened by his use of vibrantly-coloured pastel and a surrealist touch. Three stalked, organic forms look like slender, candle-shaped fruit, stylized apple, and a plump curving gourd. Shaded into appealing sculptural presence, they glow in candied shades of yellow, red, and green. Working without reference to real objects, photographs or specific images, Party instead begins his compositions with impulses from memory, weaving art-historical echoes into a playful idiom that is entirely his own.

The qualities of pastel destines Party to work with great care, condensing his voyages through art history into crisp, immediate compositions. He takes haptic pleasure in his medium, often massaging the powdery pigment with his fingers to model forms into three-dimensional relief, arresting on canvas that which cannot be still. Still Life captures precisely this sense of suspense and contradiction. Wearing his learning lightly, Party distils a timeless, placeless picture from the metaphysical idea of the “still life”. Its forms are at once vividly defined and deeply mysterious; they feel recognizable and yet utterly unreal.