
Jonny Niesche’s Atoms Encode sees the Sydney-based artist push his unique painting practice even further, literally stretching it to create a work that holistically “skins” the entire rear wall of the gallery. An immense painterly gesture that will take over the back gallery of 1301SW, while the lengthy front space features a row of diamonds.
Presenting a group of four large-scale works of multi-layered voile set in polished brass, this group of diamonds are created in vibrant colours merging and morphing into one another within each picture, a combination that reveals the familiar Nieschian effects of shimmer and moiré. This prismatic grotto is extended with a corner work representing a complex architecture of light, its angles reference the Donald Judd stack while firmly situated in a Euro discothèque, projections of softened pantone tones stagger between reflecting gold mirrors.
In the gallery’s viewing room, a trio of lightboxes broadcast their energy analogously to the paintings in voile, even coupled with the reflective frame, yet these are but another example of how Niesche’s precise practice allows for a great deal of diversion. These lightboxes, a new venture, perhaps also talk to the show’s title, Atoms Encode, in the most literal way: “Atoms are not just matter, they also continuously transmit, encode and store information: the medium of such a pancomputationalism (the idea that everything computes) would be light.”








Jonny Niesche works across an expanded field of painting, sculpture and abstraction, where his vividly coloured work wraps the viewer in total sensory stimulation. The seductive, iridescent surfaces of his paintings hum and shimmer with pigment, colour that seems to float slightly above the voile surface. The effect is intensified by the indistinct edges between bands of colour that surround the dark middle ground. As one tone blurs and dissolves into the next, a silky insubstantiality of pure colour and sensation emerges. Niesche has long worked with the intrinsic relationship between colour, form and light to produce formal and optically charged works that challenge our perception of space. His painting offers a transformative formal beauty that is enchantingly deceptive. The glowing neon tones and soft pastels that flow from a mysterious dark centre are finished with reflective gold rims, mirroring the viewer back to his or her self in a surprising encounter with the artwork.

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