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Lot Essay
Looming almost 2.5 metres in height, Pink Tulips (2017) is a superb large-scale work by Nicolas Party, who uses the medium of pastel on canvas to restage and re-energise traditional artistic subjects. The composition holds a tall grey vase of six pink tulips, whose petals and leaves stand out in crisp relief against a perfectly opaque black backdrop. One leaf bends playfully over the vase’s lip; the vase itself stands on a flat, off-white floor, recalling the stone ledges seen in the austere bodegón still lifes of the Spanish Baroque. Working without reference to real objects, photographs or specific images, Party’s witty, postmodern practice instead sees him cross-examine art-historical cues—from the centuries-old vanitas tradition to Giorgio Morandi’s monastic still lifes and the clear, bright visions of Matisse and Hockney. Rather than depicting the world, his works explore the elements of genre, and how any given artwork exists in relation to the continuum of art history. They also create conversations between themselves, with each canvas becoming a character in his stage-like exhibition settings. In Three Seasons, his debut show at Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels, in 2017, Pink Tulips was shown alongside two others in the same vertical format: Nude depicted a standing nude seen from behind, and Long Pot a tall green vessel. While toying with formal affinities among these canonised subjects, the trio also seemed to propose Party’s tall canvas and dark, enigmatic backdrop as its own stage, window or interior, a space where any apparition might be possible.
Party takes great pleasure in ‘painting’ with pastel, massaging the pigment with his fingers to model forms into precise, three-dimensional relief. Unlike oil paint, pastel does not lend itself to retouching. ‘The nature of the medium is much more direct’, he explains. ‘Nothing dries or is wet—it stays exactly how it is’ (N. Party, quoted in T. Loos, ‘Artist Nicolas Party Revives the Language of Pastel’, Cultured Magazine, 17 March 2019). This material fixity is particularly apt for the still life: a genre that Party understands as inherently paradoxical, arresting on canvas a world that cannot be still. ‘It’s like a life drawing class’, he says, ‘where the model has to stay still, like a Greek statue … Clay or glass or any kind of material is also always moving and transforming, just at a different pace. If you look at Morandi’s paintings, you can see that everything is moving and that the pots are in the process of transforming into something else. I guess the word ‘still life’ (or nature morte) is a good example of what art tries to achieve: merging two opposite notions into one object’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ‘Interview Nicolas Party’, Spike, no. 44, Summer 2015). The theatrical stillness of Pink Tulips captures this contradiction. Rather than acting as a vehicle for symbolism, trompe-l’oeil trickery or spatial proposition, Party’s still life seems to perform its own tense, suspended relationship with reality.
If the metaphysical qualities of Pink Tulips align him with Morandi, or his subject matter with the Spanish and Flemish masters of old, Party’s deft use of pastel lends the work a stark iconicity that is distinctively his. Often associated with softness and femininity, pastel has traditionally been used to conjure evanescent, saturated effects of light and colour: as with Degas’ dynamic ballet dancers, for example, or Odilon Redon’s floral fantasias. In Party’s hands, the medium becomes graphic, well-defined and sculptural. He renders Pink Tulips’ petals, leaves and vessel alike in the same texture, unifying them in a masquerade of unyielding surface. At the same time, the powdery mineral pigment lends the flowers an arresting luminosity, and a mysterious, velvety depth to the black background. Distilled from the idea of the ‘still life’, the picture stands outside of time and place, wavering between overt artificiality and captivating illusion. ‘Art in all its forms can allow humans to feel time very differently from how our body tells us to feel it’, Party has said. ‘Nature always reminds us that our body will disappear soon; that life is a very brief moment. This is not the case in a still life’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ibid.).
Party takes great pleasure in ‘painting’ with pastel, massaging the pigment with his fingers to model forms into precise, three-dimensional relief. Unlike oil paint, pastel does not lend itself to retouching. ‘The nature of the medium is much more direct’, he explains. ‘Nothing dries or is wet—it stays exactly how it is’ (N. Party, quoted in T. Loos, ‘Artist Nicolas Party Revives the Language of Pastel’, Cultured Magazine, 17 March 2019). This material fixity is particularly apt for the still life: a genre that Party understands as inherently paradoxical, arresting on canvas a world that cannot be still. ‘It’s like a life drawing class’, he says, ‘where the model has to stay still, like a Greek statue … Clay or glass or any kind of material is also always moving and transforming, just at a different pace. If you look at Morandi’s paintings, you can see that everything is moving and that the pots are in the process of transforming into something else. I guess the word ‘still life’ (or nature morte) is a good example of what art tries to achieve: merging two opposite notions into one object’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ‘Interview Nicolas Party’, Spike, no. 44, Summer 2015). The theatrical stillness of Pink Tulips captures this contradiction. Rather than acting as a vehicle for symbolism, trompe-l’oeil trickery or spatial proposition, Party’s still life seems to perform its own tense, suspended relationship with reality.
If the metaphysical qualities of Pink Tulips align him with Morandi, or his subject matter with the Spanish and Flemish masters of old, Party’s deft use of pastel lends the work a stark iconicity that is distinctively his. Often associated with softness and femininity, pastel has traditionally been used to conjure evanescent, saturated effects of light and colour: as with Degas’ dynamic ballet dancers, for example, or Odilon Redon’s floral fantasias. In Party’s hands, the medium becomes graphic, well-defined and sculptural. He renders Pink Tulips’ petals, leaves and vessel alike in the same texture, unifying them in a masquerade of unyielding surface. At the same time, the powdery mineral pigment lends the flowers an arresting luminosity, and a mysterious, velvety depth to the black background. Distilled from the idea of the ‘still life’, the picture stands outside of time and place, wavering between overt artificiality and captivating illusion. ‘Art in all its forms can allow humans to feel time very differently from how our body tells us to feel it’, Party has said. ‘Nature always reminds us that our body will disappear soon; that life is a very brief moment. This is not the case in a still life’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ibid.).