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Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld presents Nicolas Pol: Sick Atavus of the New Blood Art Opening in New York Thursday May 5th, 2011


Image:Bathed Pouacrus, 2010 226 x 397 cm oil on canvas

May 5, 2011 – May 22, 2011
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.


Image:Virgin on Crime Scene, 205 x 270cm silkscreen, oil on canvas

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.”

Since 2001, Pol has participated in a slew of international exhibitions. Born in Paris, Pol spent much of his childhood in Africa before spending his adolescence in France. He went on to earn his degree at the prestigious Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne. Following two successful solo shows at Alsopp Contemporary in London, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld has presented Pol’s work in two large scale international exhibitions – The Martus Maw in New York in 2009 and The Mother of Pouacrus in London in 2010. Pol has participated in numerous group exhibitions in prestigious institutions such as the J-en Rêve Fondation Cartier, the Plus Que Vrai ENSBA Salle des Quais in Paris and the Loic le Gaillard in London.

A new monograph featuring the paintings and drawings of Nicolas Pol with an essay by David Hunt will be available on the occasion of the exhibition.

Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld presents Nicolas Pol: Sick Atavus of the New Blood
Address: 560 Washington Street, New York, NY 10006

vladimirrestoinroitfeld.com/

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