Nick Jensen: Boy Towards

Duarte Sequeira is thrilled to announce the first solo presentation of British artist Nick Jensen in Seoul.⁠

Perception is the organization, identification and interpretation of the information in your brain. Traditionally it has been described like a machine; sensory information goes in and creates a response as a result. Yet in reality neuroscientists are discovering that our relationship to sight, smell, taste and feeling is more like a filtering process. We are looking for anomalies to the expected. Things that don’t sit with the shapes, colours and lights that we are used to interpreting. When we look at the world it is not necessarily what is real but what we expect to experience.

Nick Jensen’s paintings are like depictions of sensations. The looseness of his media – an intuitive mixture of watercolour and acrylic – echoes the grasping of the ephemeral nature of the everyday. Glimpses of a moment. There is a playfulness here. Background, foreground and figure interacting, held together by possibility. Often his figures are captured in play – riding bikes, moving toy trains, mid game. A universal sense of forgetting and focus.

There is often a sense of narrative in his work – bodies pausing in motion, fluidly crossing the canvas. The sense of story also comes through his unique use of colour. The palette here is muted and sensitive. Small pops of deep red or royal blue against waves of rusts, pale blue, sienna and shadow. Interestingly the artist notes that cubism is a strong influence – the colours of Braque and early Picasso evident in how his figures spill into the space around them.  

The artist creates his work through his imagination and an amalgam of found images or subtly taken phone images which he works up from watercolours into the compositions on canvas. There is a quotidian subtext to the images. However, there is a sense of unease or dissonance under their seeming beauty. These are characters on thresholds of space.

 Francesca Gavin

Nick Jensen was born in 1984 in the UK and lives and works in London. He received his MA in Fine Art from Chelsea School of Art and Design in 2010 and his BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins in 2007.