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 more determined to capture the state of mind of the figure than a likeness.” His subjects are caught in the quiet act of introspection.

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.