Nicholas Campbell: Last Chance
Nicholas Campbell's paintings depart from conventional mark making. His surfaces are defined by acts of removal such as wiping, pressing, and smudging, rather than additive brushwork. In many passages, the pigment appears to have been stripped away moments after application, leaving residues of blurred stains, abrasions, and atmospheric discolouration. His repeated use of deep, oxidised tones including red, brown, black, burgundy, and copper produces a surface that withdraws from brightness and favours visual compression over expansion. This chromatic restraint cultivates a dense and muted air that sits low across the painting's register.
The works are constructed through layered gestures, producing surfaces with psychological and material weight. The use of aluminum as a support, a surface typically associated with speed, industrial production, and neutrality, intensifies the contrast between the hardness of the substrate and the instability of the painted field. As the viewer follows the residual movements of the artist's hand, the visual field becomes slippery and at times resists spatial orientation. Campbell's compositional strategies point to a shift in how painting can operate, not through iconography or narrative but through the atmospheric charge of surface and process.
Campbell developed his visual language in mid 2010s Los Angeles, shaped by the cultural textures of SoundCloud based rap, local subcultures, and the psychological economy of street racing. The intensity of speed and consumption common to those environments, often excluded from traditional visual discourse, becomes material in his work. The emotional registers of aggression, performance, and control that circulate in these spaces reappear on the canvas as formal pressure. His paintings do not present images of subculture; they restructure its affective states into a painterly vocabulary.
Painting, in Campbell's practice, becomes a carrier of condensed emotional experience. The surface collects not only pigment but also temporal accumulation, which might be understood as psychological residue. In this process, painting is stripped of theatricality or narrative ambition. The composition holds instead as a surface of interference, tension, and sedimentation.
The titles Taurus and Aries reference mythological figures such as Zeus in the form of a bull or the flying ram of Nephele, but these works offer no iconographic clues. The references function as symbolic coordinates rather than illustrations. Through them, Campbell introduces themes of desire, ritual, sacrifice, and transformation without relying on visual storytelling. These associations remain peripheral but suggest a system through which the viewer may locate the intensity that drives each painting.
In contrast, the Untitled works remove even that minimal interpretive frame. These compositions draw from urban textures such as burnt rubber on asphalt, scattered oil on corroded metal, and sonic distortion in low fidelity audio. They do not describe these references directly, but the visual logic follows their material conditions: fragmentation, repetition, and residue. The paintings resist coherence and favor instability as a structural tool.
Written by Gosari Research