SALANDER-O 'REILLY GALLERIES.

GRAHAM NICKSON

Graham Nickson follows the sun, from Australia to Florida to Italy, in pursuit of an untouched paradise--a space where the body is able to blissfully enjoy its own existence. The world he paints is pagan nature at its most charged, full of longing. Known for his use of intense, saturated, glowing color--color that seems to bring light to a boil--Nickson is primarily a painter of erotic landscape. In Inlet: Dark Water, 1981-97 the female bather in the center is a modem Venus. The sun plays off her body, accented by the decisive gesture of the towel with which she dries herself, a framing device like the seashell in Botticelli's Birth of Venus. And as in the Botricelli, the woman is bracketed by a number of figures, most conspicuously the standing man to her left and the raised leg of the woman to her right. They are her consorts, paying homage to her allure.

Nickson's figures are nearly naked bodies in a seaside Eden, where nature is stripped to its basics. He always depicts a remote, exotic locale, where the body can return to a more natural state, and it is indeed the body of nature that ultimately attracts him-not nature as a symbol of our embodiment, but the bodiliness of nature as a seductive phenomenon in itself. Thus he prefers to work at dawn or dusk, when sunlight seems most spontaneous and dramatic. It is then that nature seems newborn, particularly in the tropical places Nickson studies it -- raw scenes of sky and land, as fluid as the water between the two. Such a scene forms the background of Inlet: Dark Water and recurs in a variety of changing lights in Nickson's numerous plein air watercolors (not included here). Each scene is an epiphany of nature at its most vital, not subjected to human interference but ripe for human enjoyment.

In short, Nickson is a hedonist, and his works have something of the quality of what Clement Greenberg called luxury painting. But what for Greenberg was decadence, an overplaying of the medium for theatrical effect, is for Nickson an opportunity for freshness and innocence. Renewing their relationship with nature, human beings can access the paradise of the natural body, which in Nickson's pictures means merging with the boundless beyond of the landscape, brought close and made concrete in the color of the changing sky, which becomes a reflection of our moods. His work suggests that nature, conveying an oceanic feeling of vitality, is our one true luxury.