There’s something about Nick’s work that makes you look – even look back. You’re taken off guard because what you see is both familiar (almost nostalgic), yet somehow there is a disturbance in the force. You look back again and see something that shouldn’t be there but for all intents and purposes, that thing, that ghostly apparition, sits perfectly calmly in its oddness.
This is surrealism without the shock of the hyper-real or dreamed-up fantasy where forms are morphed and distorted. This is a realism that surpasses the normative. It is as cheeky as it is playful, although you can never be really sure what the game is – all you know is that you’re having fun.
You look again and notice the surface: the disappearing layers of paint that wash away like an outgoing tide. This water is moody and dark. It is a night lit only by a distant moon. Shapes are revealed as clouds move away, allowing a lunar light. A snake slithers toward a group of trees. Their silhouettes slowly emerge from a gothic romance, a tale of mystery, of the found and the lost.
There is a story here, unfolding in whispers. Are they half-truths, or are they riddles only solvable by the duality of a cryptic clue? It doesn’t matter. You are not asked to decipher, only to receive.
Nick Collerson’s show is titled The Tail and sits in the white elegance of a converted warehouse in Zetland, at PALAS, 42 Hansard st. You can catch it Wednesday to Saturday until the 23rd of August. Just ring the bell and wait to be let in. It’s a visit that will stay with you. You won’t have to look back. The taste of a sublime warmth will go with you, as memories of half-remembered glances also go with you. A tale follows you back out into the city – like conversations overheard that revisit you, maybe in a dream, maybe in a moment when the sublime does, in fact, become real – like the deep taste of some forbidden fruit.
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The Tail by Nick Collerson
Wed-Sat until 23 August
PALAS, 24 Hansart st, Zetland
More info here
