Nikolas Soren Goodich
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Artist Statement

Nikolas Soren Goodich Artist Photo by Josh White

In my practice I make paintings on layers of plexiglass resulting in multiple layers of either transparent, translucent, or opaque mark, texture, and hue. The plexi sheets, full of natural symmetry and asymmetry on both sides, are joined together and assembled onto canvas or wood panels as support or are framed as two-sided works with LED lights built into my own specially designed maple wood frames. This allows light itself to become a central medium at play within the painting’s surfaces, creating works with luminous translucent interiors.

These bodies of work, Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries, both adhere to a strict set of formal rules and techniques. The two-sided works, Luminous Symmetries, operate sculpturally, whether on pedestals, or suspended out in space architecturally, as walls and windows, creating vibrant openings to a new radiant lived-in world.

Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries examine portraiture as pure symbol, with human profiles center-cut, forms interacting with their own mirrored images of ‘self’ and/or summoning an imagined ‘other.’ These are gender fluid, multi-racial beings, ‘portraits’ of ‘you,’ or ‘me,’ asking viewers to look back at themselves, and at others, in the context of a shared and private search for a means of survival and mutual understanding.

The nature of the images in these pieces—souls, bodies, be-ing as metaphor, the physical and psychic spaces they inhabit—present as organic and geometric symmetries, asymmetries, as arterial fields, echoes, reflections, coalescing matter, a certain telepathy, and the balance and/or contradictions of basic human communication.

These are simple, direct narratives belied by the maximalist complexity of the abstract mark and dynamic, and their geometric compositional structures, with direct references to physics, biology, chemistry, neurology. These references play paradoxical roles in the works’ visual and subtextual levels of content. The juxtaposition of organic textures within structured layered compositions, paradoxically recalls heated psychological investigation and clinical anatomical analysis.

There is an interpenetration of abstraction, organic patterning, and figuration in these paintings that acts as layered information appearing in simultaneity; paradoxical forms that are simultaneously creating, reflecting, revealing, and obfuscating potential content, literally, visually, and metaphorically.

Nikolas Soren Goodich
11/03/2021