Whether to read a surface of a painting as actual surface and texture (paint manipulated and reacting on canvas or wood), or as simulated surface (crafted to mimic/resemble other surfaces) Nadine’s painting deal with a materiality that connects the viewer to what it might feel like to be in a space surrounded/engulfed in stuff/matter/objects/things both real and artificial, and the vulnerabilities and challenges that these environments bring – from a war zone landscape to the inside of a dust filled room. Her sophisticated surfaces both actual surface of paint and receptor, and the suggested surfaces of objects and matter have qualities of deterioration, disorientation and instability. It maybe that these surfaces remind us of things we know in the world – rusty metal, burnt lone tree, dripping paint from a can of spray paint on a scratched wooden door, or/and bound up in a rich behaviour of paint and its endless possibilities.
You can move from one surface and space to another, such as in one particular painting a pollard tree floats into the air like an untethered crazy helium balloon – into a collapsing reality which is swept away by the complex materiality of paint where the rules of gravity draw the paint down towards the floor, while the ‘real’ tree remains standing when it should have fallen down!
The complex depth to these explored surfaces and subsequent spaces adjusts the eyes to search beyond the stuff of canvas and paint and the implied image to further hidden places – layers retreating as if been excavated layer by layer in search of something lurking beneath – an invitation to step that much further in/inside – to an unmapped and disorientating space. These shifts in surface experience – whether the paint, canvas, image or excavated layers – there is always slippage and seamless movement from one surface and space to another, never allowing for a too comfortable occupation, but instead a continuous and challenging experience that comes with enormous rewards.