Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld is pleased to present Sick Atavus of the New Blood, a new solo exhibition of the Paris-based artist Nicolas Pol. Transforming the industrial setting of 560 Washington Street into a guerilla museum space, the exhibition features a suite of twenty new paintings and sixteen drawings that densely and frenetically layer paint with stencils, text, and silkscreens of commercial information. Pol’s works are webs of contradiction that pit the classical against the delinquent, recasting the practice of the Ab-Ex Mod... Read more

Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld is pleased to present Sick Atavus of the New Blood, a new solo exhibition of the Paris-based artist Nicolas Pol. Transforming the industrial setting of 560 Washington Street into a guerilla museum space, the exhibition features a suite of twenty new paintings and sixteen drawings that densely and frenetically layer paint with stencils, text, and silkscreens of commercial information. Pol’s works are webs of contradiction that pit the classical against the delinquent, recasting the practice of the Ab-Ex Modernists in a savvy swindle of both art history and contemporary painting. This is the second New York exhibition for Nicolas Pol.

Anything but calm, with no fear of the grotesque or vulgar, Pol’s canvases are dynamic, bold, raw, and cataclysmic. The show’s title, Sick Atavus of the New Blood, points at the morbidity and violence that undergirds every one of Pol’s rough strokes. Yet it also belies a technological paranoia, both in the sci-fi reference of “Atavus,” and, perhaps, in whatever manner that “new blood” springs forth.

As Pol writes: “Boxes are vanities. Hollow like skulls. Vanities of human enterprises, technological progress or power. Computers make fake easy. They are the laziest way to make metaphysical statements. Beyond pessimism. Is it really the builder or the destroyer that cares for the future?”

Pol and his canvases are, above all else, a punk laboratory in which the energies of disparate references rebound – Klee, Cronenberg, the martyrdom of Michael Jackson, mopeds zipping through Parisian traffic, Goya, Condo, Marvel comics, parasites, Vienna Actionists, Brillo Boxes, stinking cheese and Poisson. When text and logos pop up in the melee of the paint, they serve primarily to heighten the abstract buzz. As Pol writes, “there is no realistic information;” rather, the text serves to “charge the paintings, like an amulet, with formulas.”