Nick Mauss exhbition: Solo Exhibition

Campoli Presti is pleased to present Nick Mauss’ second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Mauss takes the mode of drawing, found at the interstices of various media, processes and histories, and dilates, twists, folds, intensifies and loosens those gaps to produce a different mode of making art.

For this exhibition, Mauss arrives at works that seem to be oscillating in their own processes, like the irretrievable word throbbing behind the tongue. Various material confusions and shifts of scale describe drawing as an approach in which the distracted motif, and line itself, becomes a material. Here, Mauss takes lines and outputs them as steel filigree, upon which he draws over, again and again, in pastel. The preliminary qualities of a sketch are translated into substance, creating a passage between anticipation and full realization, invention and variation. Works incised into reflective supports (made over the past two years) alternate with new drawings on plaster poured over wire mesh. The exhibition itself is arranged as if by interleaving, where the gallery space has gaps, like the protective blank pages laid between the pages of a book.

The drawing, or study, is the action that comes both before the artwork but also after – as a way of studying or « seeing » the existing artwork, or more generally, things in the world. The simultaneity of before and after happens in the present of a work that is unhinged from a productive process of becoming something else.