Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Nicolas Africano
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Bloomington, IL: Cometogetherspace
76%
[Unknown Title]. c1975. Oil on canvas
From his beginnings, Africano's aim has been to form pictorial armatures whereon his phrases and symbols can appear sturdy and ambiguous, not syrupy or pat in the way it seems they long to be. This painting is a chief accomplishment among the similarly styled early works — scumbling, hazes, deer- and forest-symbology, jewelled edges of dollops of paint — for being particularly densely arranged, though not at all laden. Generally, Africano cultivates slight dissonances between his representations (cute, easy) and his representational structures/materials (hard, often grating). The latter manifest here as surface roughness and a separation-by-embedded-framings of the subject from its attributes. The painting's value lies in the rhyme between the two plants at lower left (one in-frame, one out-); in the gaps within the ensconcing grid of symbols, which atmospheric washes fill up; and in the ways pinks or airy blues vibrate alone against mud that’s all around them. (2024)
Peoria, IL: Peoria Riverfront Museum
74%
The Wedding. c1975. Oil on carpet
Perhaps Africano is an abstractionist who can't own up to it, and his characters and phrases are so much sublimation. This piece (to which there's an origin-story type story attached about needing to whip something up overnight for a school project) supports that idea, especially given the clear connection to Harold Boyd's work, in which figures and their storming grounds often relate to each other with a similar sort of charged indifference. The edge-tassels of the carpet that serves as support are all glommed up and thickened; this creates a fittingly abject border for the maelstrom, plus it somewhat justifies the equivocal pictorial structure by emphasizing the work's object-quality. What also justifies the "formlessness" is the way it seems to concentrate and invert in the two figures, who are by turns indistinct and firm, a result of the impasto from which they're built blending at times into the surrounding grey. (2024)
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
69%
The Continuing. c1975. Oil on canvas
While the attempt to streamline this painting is commendable, Africano's works from the seventies are typically better when they're slightly busier than this. I think that's because his symbology is so abstract and tangential that there's little danger of his pictographs becoming laden or overexplained. Their meanings instead tend to heap on each other like so many playful kids, which fails to happen here. Notwithstanding, the deer/bouquet pairing is evocative, and since the former seems to rest behind the latter it provides a strange depth to the picture that the rough blue ground seems almost to refuse to acknowledge. The whole surface is heavily worked and glisteny, so that it appears smooth and rugged in equal measure. (2024)