NICK DOYLE

Nick Doyle’s pictorial and sculptural work inserts itself within North American typecasts, a pop iconography mixed with representations from material culture. The California-born New York-based artist deliberately and objectively flips history upside down through a generation of stereotyped images and other modernities. Here the ‘low’ subject defeats the ‘high’ work in a game of transfigured savoir-faire. Meticulous and luxurious the artist’s techniques involve handwork and artisanal virtuosity applied to registers of forms and not-conforming structures. Close to the bone, cruel, akin to Joan Didion’s intransigent realism, the ready-made blends with the man-made, in almost nocturnal despair-hued indigo blues. In a tone borrowed from sharp satire, Doyle tugs at the perverse edges of our contemporary era and its entropy.

From the outset, the choice of preliminary images is understood to be paramount however, these ‘icons,’ are deceptive or recalcitrant. Selected for their evocative power, they are critical storytellers of an American culture whose present is outmoded, clinging to a bygone conservative-era model of reality shaped by hackneyed ideals. A thorny cactus, a paintbrush left behind, a garbage bag filled to capacity, a broken pencil, a cut-up tie: as many banal signs and emblems as those in a washed-out materialistic society. These domesticated landscapes originate from the eternal conquest of the Wild West and the perpetuation of a ‘modernist myth.’ Similarly to a cinematic wide shot, the series of objects brings forth a ‘Made in the USA’ heritage that movies and pop culture have endorsed. Resonant with film director Kelly Reichardt’s universe, Doyle depicts the agonies and impasses of a society in ruins, where forsaken artifacts and décor coexist in a mercantile prosody. His work revisits the roots of consumerism: the producer and its target. Since the human figure is absent, the objects become the actors. The oversized scale of the works heightens this corporeal effect, even substitutes it through mirroring and echoing, testing the viewer. Individual consistency, from the cowboy to the trader in particular, is called into question. So great and so defeated, one might say. Nevertheless, in the absence of a background or stable décor, the viewer faces the edges of a hollowed-out world, a front-facing copy paste, torn from ‘artificial realism.’

The marquetry of textile, central to Doyle’s work, presents in a range of polychrome hues the quest for the restitution of the source image: maple wood, vegetable-tanned leather, re-assembled denim, come together. Using the language of pattern making, often linked to tapestry, a pictorial translation materialises through the distillation of form and colour. Up close, the trompe l’œil material echoes the subjects of this cultural anthropology. Doyle’s savoir-faire is inscribed within American vernacular crafts and folklore, often intertwined by nature. Here, denim acts as a raw material, as much fertile ground as old ruin, resulting in a sensual density, visually and fundamentally human. The artist’s hand transpires through each fabric strip, then adhered onto the wooden surface of the recreated objects.

The exhibition’s title, Ruin certainly outlines darker social undertones, revealing an American dreamland turned to abstraction upon closer inspection. The highly-executed works–wood-carving, quilting and leather working–rebut their polished demeanour. While unquestionably drawn from miles of flatland, the nostalgia of the discarded bouquet counters its sun-bleached tones.

Press release courtesy Perrotin. Text: Mathieu Buard.