Nikolas Soren Goodich '87

ARTIST STATEMENT

I make paintings on layers of plexiglass resulting in multiple layers of either transparent, translucent, or opaque marks, textures and hues. Plexi sheets, full of natural symmetry and asymmetry on both sides, are joined together and then assembled onto canvas or wood panels as support, or as two-sided works with LED lights built into specially designed wood frames. The LEDs allow light itself to become a central medium at play within the painting’s surfaces, artworks with luminous translucent interior spaces.

The two-sided works, Luminous Symmetries, operate sculpturally, whether on pedestals, or suspended out in space architecturally, as walls and windows, creating vibrant openings to a new radiant lived-in world.

My two current bodies of work, Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries, examine portraiture as a pure symbol, human profiles interacting with mirrored images of ‘self’ and/or summoning an imagined ‘other.’ These are gender fluid, multiracial ‘portraits’ of ‘you,’ or ‘me,’ that ask viewers to look at themselves, and at others, in the context of shared and private searches for empathy, existential survival and mutual understanding.

The nature of these pieces—images of souls and the psychic spaces they inhabit—present organic and geometric symmetries, asymmetries, arterial fields, echoes, reflections, coalescing matter, a certain telepathy and the balance and/or contradictions of basic human communication.

These are simple, direct narratives belied by a maximalist complexity of abstract marks and dynamics, and geometric compositional structures, with direct reference to physics, biology, chemistry, neurology. These references play paradoxical roles in the works’ visual and subtextual levels of content. Juxtaposition of organic textures within structured layered compositions, paradoxically recall heated psychological investigation and clinical anatomical analysis.

There is an interpenetration of abstraction, organic patterning and figuration that acts as layered information in simultaneity; paradoxical forms simultaneously creating, reflecting, revealing and obfuscating content, literally and metaphorically.