Nick Collerson

Born 1977 New­found­land, Cana­da
Lives and works in Syd­ney, Australia

Nick Coller­son cre­ates paint­ings that dance with sym­bol­ism yet defy com­pli­ance to a rigid struc­ture or ide­al. Collerson’s imagery is instead based in an open dis­cus­sion. In his work, frag­ments, objects, fig­ures, and per­spec­tives oscil­late in com­po­si­tions that resist anchor points or hier­ar­chies yet are not ambiva­lent. Fig­ures cede way to objects, archi­tec­ture, or hues of colour, which con­verse­ly offer space back to fig­ures. These are works that offer a lan­guage of per­spec­tive – not only in a pure­ly reti­nal sense, but also with­in the per­spec­tive of which we draw on, for­mu­late and process under­stand­ing, and how we read objects and symbols. 

The act of paint­ing and the mate­r­i­al val­ue of paint­ing is an active mode of Collerson’s think­ing. There are no tricks in these paint­ings, no iron­ic inquiries, or allu­sions to ​‘in jokes’ which must be deci­phered or com­pre­hend­ed. The tech­nique of paint­ing is direct and approach­able in its most basic ver­nac­u­lar, and Coller­son embraces this per­ceiv­able sim­plic­i­ty of medi­um. What is elim­i­nat­ed is the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of ​‘how’, replaced with the basic foun­da­tions of pic­to­r­i­al explo­ration. In look­ing, one can swap micro for macro or per­haps use the lens of one to view the oth­er. Collerson’s paint­ings sug­gest this is not only true of imagery, or nar­ra­tive, but also with­in the process­es and pat­terns we use to aggre­gate or inves­ti­gate ideas. These shifts do not exclude, but encour­age pos­si­bil­i­ty, trust, dis­trust (or mis­trust) to coa­lesce in a space that keeps all options firm­ly on the table. In this there are deep con­nec­tions to the think­ing of the Ancient Greeks, the sym­bol­ists, the sur­re­al­ists and the pat­a­physi­cists – a cho­rus line of junc­tures that have pre­dat­ed, agi­tat­ed, or veered away from the struc­ture (or attri­bu­tion) of wide­ly adopt­ed west­ern think­ing on aes­thet­ics and understanding. 

Coller­son is mak­ing new work of old ideas, and this work adopts a gen­er­ous pro­pos­al in a con­ver­sa­tion that (despite its age) is far from exhausted.