εὐδαίμων good-daemon
Nick Collerson

In an exhi­bi­tion of eight paint­ings, Nick Coller­son offers ren­der­ings of forms, fig­ures and tableaus that linger at the edges of the vis­i­ble and the conscious. 

The title of the exhi­bi­tion, εὐδαίμων — trans­lat­ed as ​‘good-dae­mon’ – estab­lish­es the con­di­tion of play, con­tra­dic­tion, and plas­tic­i­ty which is cen­tral to the artist’s prac­tice. The ​‘good’ demon is itself a para­dox. Not because it is ​‘bad’, but rather because the demon presents an enig­mat­ic ​‘oth­er’– a ves­sel or a mes­sage, not, not bad, and not, not good. It is mul­ti­plic­i­ty rather than dual­i­ty and allows Collerson’s work to be enjoyed as ​‘seri­ous play’, a scaf­fold of curios­i­ty and inquiry, where con­tra­dic­tions are inten­tion­al­ly unresolved.

A recur­ring motif in Collerson’s paint­ings is the side­walk, which serves as a cru­cial anchor. This seem­ing­ly neu­tral space, where one moves and is moved, becomes a repos­i­to­ry for an end­less index of images: smoke, con­tain­ers, chairs, cats, signs, moons, plan­ets, frag­ments. There is mean­ing and sym­bol­ism attached to the sub­jects in the paint­ings, but equal­ly so, a body is just a body, a cat is just a cat, a chair is just a chair; the ten­sion between loaded mean­ing and ele­men­tal sim­plic­i­ty is left open, sus­pend­ed. They are pieces, like a col­lage, like com­pound words, like mis­spelt words… like the poet­ic modes of inquiry of which the artist is deeply invested.

In these paint­ings there are notice­able shifts and turns evi­denced in the under­paint­ing and wash­es. There are signs of era­sure that could be com­po­si­tion­al choic­es or sug­gest that part of the paint­ing has mere­ly moved on to a dif­fer­ent place – these are not sta­t­ic arte­facts, but in a state of transformation. 

The paren­the­sised title for Collerson’s paint­ing Drag­on Man offers the encap­su­la­tion of these ideas, (They Speak of String­ing Togeth­er Any­thing as Some­one Who is Logos. Nei­ther good or bad, nor true or false; and nei­ther not good or not bad, nor not true or not false…and on in this man­ner chrono-log­i­cal­ly…). Coller­son makes new paint­ings of old ideas. They are a molten and reflec­tive under­stand­ing of how we per­ceive and inter­pret meaning.