Nick Lowe: 8:00 PM

Sep 15

Sep 15 Nick Lowe: 8:00 PM

By Christina McPhee

At Left Field, Nick Lowe’s expressive fields of oil stick markings spread in anxious cumuli (“Packed Clouds”), like a viral load. Desire for and fear of proximity inflect these 30 x 40 inch canvases, whose materiality as textile will have disappeared as Lowe applies as many as eight layers of polished gesso, before setting upon them with oil sticks. Having erased all signs of the ground, Lowe’s mark-making risks flights of cheerful, deadpan and slightly nutty abandon, infused with a mid-century-Modern, Angelino color sensibility, as in “Three Ladders” (above).

Nick Lowe, “Martian Thoughts”, 2021, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”.

Lowe’s “Martian Thoughts” recalls those goon-squad guys ‘just driving around and smoking” in Philip Guston’s late paintings. Lowe bounces matted balls of oil stick marks into tight tangles as if to suggest we’re inside a game of catch with a cabal of feral cats. Nick Lowe skirts the edges of horror, then swerves.

Another cognate comes to mind: Dana Schultz’s “Presentation,” which I saw at MoMA first in 2005. Schultz lays her victim before a ravenous mob. A related vibe of the grotesque edges around Lowe’s restless line, and yet something else is happening here, not sequenced to the ‘shock and awe’ aughts. Now in 2021, that spirit of Grand Guignol meets the most everyday terms of domestic life. Nick Lowe delivers dry humor in massed bubbles just past their peak saturation points: now they’ve precipitated out as “Diet Dr Pepper in a Champagne Wine Glass,” and “Hairdryer Left On All NIght.”

Lowe’s workman-like attitude, his non-romantic understanding of the artist, figures into these deadpan equations between hot color and gritty linework—that idea that you finish a drawing, you go get a taco, you come back and draw some more.