Nicholas Reese

Nicholas Reese is a French painter.
For several years, he and his brother Sébastien have created decorative art works combining paint and metal leaf, notably extraordinary mirrors halfway between paintings and reflections. Never totally reflective, the surface consists in blurry, scratched, cloudy glass where the objects reflected seem to get lost.
Nicholas also seeks to create that cloudiness in his paintings. He works on raw or primed canvas, superimposing colours, ink, chalk and metal oxides like so many veils over the subject, which seems to fade away and disappear.
Observing the painting means trying to grasp the image, the hidden object. Time is needed to contemplate it. Viewers cannot possibly remain uninvolved. Nicholas plays with their gaze, guiding it, plane-by-plane, to the painting’s interior and then beyond it. Here and there, a white line or a black spot catches and holds the eye, slowing it down, keeping it from being totally absorbed.
These paintings are a screen, a window on a world merely glimpsed, a moment suspended between the outside and the inside, the unreal and the real.