Nick Aguayo

My paintings are never planned. Through an amalgamation of gestures and negations, form is produced. They are intuitively constructed and rely heavily on improvisation. I think of my paintings as being like maps or diagrams of thought. Their surfaces act as a site of rumination, in which traces of decision-making are revealed and obscured. The collection of chance elements such as masking tape bleeds, drips, and pentimento not only speak to the process, but are often highlighted and guide composition. 

Artist Statement
My paintings are objects that reveal the process of their making through a layered transparency. The structural seams of the paintings are laid bare, their surfaces acting as diagrams of thought processes and decision-making.  

Making paintings is a physical activity that is performative. The tactility of painting and the use of concrete materials is a way of responding to visual and physical experience in a tangible way. I am interested in painting ( and abstraction in particular) not only as a way of responding to these experiences tangibly, but also as a vehicle to communicate a narrative or psychological affect that attempts to exist outside of language or representation.

In my recent paintings, compositional elements are organized in a way that recalls an operating table, in which the anatomical parts of a painting are dissected. The compositions swing between harmony and a kind of dissonance. I’m interested in the paintings resting in this state of almost falling apart, and how this status may create a tension that challenges and questions the expectations of a painting.