Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present Intimate Interiors, an exhibition of oil paintings and pastels by artist Adrian Nivola, on view from February 17th through April 2nd. This solo exhibition, his second with Tayloe Piggott Gallery, tackles a variety of themes, with Nivola working from memory and driven by an effort to convey an enduring quality of light in ephemeral scenes. An artist reception will be held Friday, February 17th, from 5-7pm. The artist will be in attendance. All are welcome.
Seeking to transform color into light, Adrian Nivola portrays the atmosphere of interiors where figures reside in solitude, part and parcel of the light they radiate. The artist derives inspiration from a dialogue with a variety of great painters from the past, chief among them Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Nivola's interest lies in the timeless preoccupations articulated by Bonnard, who Nivola quotes as having said, "I'm trying to do what I have never done - give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing." Another of Bonnard's observations was, "There has always been color but color has yet to become light…Our God is light." According to Nivola, the exciting challenge proposed by painters like Bonnard is not to try to illustrate a light scenario but to generate light from the color itself. That is, the color relationships must generate vibrations and influence one another to create a unique pictorial light.
The resulting work, in paint and pastel, captures moments that feel resplendently timeless. In figurative compositions Nivola paints the people closest to him in the context of a shared interior space. With a lush impasto technique his delicate dabs of pigment are tactile and luminous. According to Nivola, "I'm not so keen on painting identifying the likeness or portrait. It's more the state of mind of the figure that interests me." Without intending to do so, his subjects are caught in the quiet act of joyful introversion.
Similarly quiet, in delicately layered pastel landscapes Nivola articulates the vast, radiant expanse of valleys in Idaho, where the sublime scale of the Western American landscape becomes a foil for the sparse and unlikely structures of its inhabitants. Nivola's mastery of scale is evident, where he captures a breadth of infinite distance on a small format. A third subject which engages Nivola's eye and hand is the ephemeral light on the jerseys of horse jockeys which he studies at the Belmont Racetrack. The sumptuous palette and accent on costume recalls Degas's pastels of the races.
A painter and sculptor, Adrian Nivola explores the absurd disparity between aspirations and limitations within his artworks. From whimsical sculptures of unplayable musical instruments to the soft light encapsulated in his oil paintings and pastels, each of Nivola's compositions express the beauty intrinsic to design that is separate from function. Illuminating how beauty can originate from aesthetic elements that are void of purpose, each of Nivola's subjects appear to have veered off course from fulfilling the function they promise. His work captivates the viewer, evoking reflection on the fickle relationship between the purpose of an object and its aesthetic value.
A simultaneous engagement in multiple mediums and techniques suits Nivola who grew up under the influence of his artist grandparents. The Sardinian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola was celebrated for his large-scale sandcast murals and his grandmother Ruth Guggenheim Nivola created jewelry from silk and metal thread. Through the legacy of his grandparents, Nivola inherited a formative philosophy of life in art. Born in 1977, Nivola began to take his professional artistic ambitions seriously at the age of 18 when he went to work for the well-known artist Caio Fonseca in Pietrasanta, Italy. He later earned a master's degree at the New York Studio School in 2008 after graduating with a BFA with distinction in painting at Yale. Nivola's work has been exhibited at many galleries and institutions including the Yale University Art & Architecture Gallery, New Haven, CT; The Paul Dietrich Gallery, Boston, MA; The Painting Center, New York, NY; and The Drawing Room, in East Hampton, NY.
