NICOLEELLIS
WHAT MAKES A PAINTING A painting is not always paint. The technical is not the actual. When I walked into the Sydney studio of Nicole Ellis, I “perceived” paintings: imposing, tightly composed, physically confronting works that seemed classically flat at some remove and then intimately tactile close-up.
The quality that unites her austerely reduced grids and more intricate layered works is light, many of her grounds glower like a fresco pigment trapped agelessly within glazed plaster. Qualities of early Renaissance painting are evident in the abstracted blocks of solid colour in ‘Time-Lapse 4’ and the tense, polished geometry of ‘Time-Lapse 9’ yet the method here is very different.
Nicole Ellis works with cloth, series, paint was peeled away from a wooden factory floor in large sheaths and hung like a loose skin on the gallery wall. In the new works paint manifests again as a
