Foreign & Domestic is delighted to announce its participation in NADA Miami 2024 with a solo presentation of new soot paintings by
Armando Nin.
"Working with soot from the flame of a candle introduces new restrictions and possibilities into the act of painting. Nin works horizontally, lying on his back with the canvas suspended above him, methodically raising his hand to the canvas in a regular, machinic tempo determined by the physics of the flame itself, a delicate medium that flickers with each breath, draft or flick of the wrist. The rings of soot can build up density in a field of staccato dots, or follow lines and contours like a trail of greasy thumbprints. Yet each mark encodes a constant and discrete quantity of time. In a few brief but decisive seconds, the soot traces the result of many interwoven forces, giving immediate shape to indiscernible and infinitesimal disturbances in the air, the hand and the heart, the studio and the street. A second too long and the flame burns through the canvas; there are no second chances.
This inexorable rhythm, inherent to the process, frees Nin to act as an antenna. Any erasure or correction leaves a conspicuous trace, public evidence of error. Like tattoos and scars, soot paintings display the complete history of their making on a flat surface. As such, soot painting demands an exceptional level of honesty and vulnerability from the artist, where the first draft is also the final draft. Inwardly, Nin relives hundreds of imaginary encounters, past relations, absent friends and lovers, inchoate emotions, witticisms and future hopes. Finally, the
giornata is spent, depositing a record of innumerable transitory instants, like piles of debris in a glacial moraine, conjuring stars, planets, minerals, hieroglyphs, bacteria, jigsaws, fields, hair and fingerprints. Nin’s work is at once a visual chronometry that literally depicts the time of its own making, a stenography of hermetic symbols, and a delicate polygraph that records fleeting moods."
Armando Nin's first solo exhibition,
A Day's Work, opened in January 2024, at Foreign & Domestic, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. This is Foreign & Domestic's first participation at NADA Miami.
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