Sutton Gallery is pleased to announce Amalgam, a solo exhibition by Nick Selenitsch.

For Selenitsch, the series Amalgam began with a consideration of the phrase “kind of” in both a linguistic and visual context. Released from its comprehensible narrative structure, Amalgam plays on the approximating nature of “kind of”: an agent of ambiguity, loosening relations, blurring definition and resisting semantic fixity. Presenting a suite of twelve paintings in artist-made frames alongside a new chalk wall drawing, Selenitsch transplants this expression of uncertainty from the verbal to the visual. Rogue serifs splinter from blocks of vibrant colour varying in each painting, as the artist dissolves legibility in pursuit of a resonant amalgamate form. Selenitsch’s wall drawing produces a melodic, impulsive site existing at the threshold of language.

The insistence upon repeated letters eschews their common meaning, funnelling cogent text into a fugue of shapes and lines. Distorted, overlapping and mutable, this new series offers a conceptual framework to explore a certain abstract potential rarely associated with language, while retaining the transgressive tenets of playfulness and not-knowing promoted throughout Selenitsch’s practice. 

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Artist text:

“Isn’t language beautiful when you don’t know what it says?” 

I instinctively uttered these words while observing a city scene in a foreign film. When indecipherable, street advertisements and shop signs are encountered as symbols of abstract potency. What bliss. I remember having the same feeling on public transport when overseas, unable to understand a single word of the conversations around me. Again: what bliss!

I’ve never liked words. I do love it when they are beautifully chosen, arranged and applied, for sure. And, over the years – with plenty of practice – I have become less intimidated by their cogency, becoming more adept at their use. Still, I don’t trust them. The default state for a word is information. I agree with Byung-Chul Han that unfortunately we live in an Information Age; an age of increasing poetic poverty. In this, words will not help us, unless they are words about what words cannot do. 

​This series of artworks – titled Amalgam – began with a consideration of the phrase “kind of.” I then collected a series of various Gothic fonts forming the words. Consolidated with the introduction of the printing press in Europe, Gothic fonts (such as Blackletter) are both kind of modern, and kind of medieval. As am I. I’d also noticed a contemporary trend to use Romantic forms (including Gothic fonts) amongst the aesthetically inclined. This has come – no doubt – as a reaction against the prevailing digital climate. I accord. As would William Morris, who faced a similar industrial challenge. 

The phrase “kind of” ambiguates relations. Further, in these artworks I wanted to render the word-image almost illegible, often completely. Towards the edges of illegibility is where my artistic interests can always be found. Colours and forms are painted with care but with a desire to show the hand. The whole process is kind of logical, and kind of impulsive. Kind of. The only definitive characteristic here is desire.

I then collected a series of various Gothic fonts forming the words. Consolidated with the introduction of the printing press in Europe, Gothic fonts (such as Blackletter) are both kind of modern, and kind of medieval. As am I. I’d also noticed a contemporary trend to use Romantic forms (including Gothic fonts) amongst the aesthetically inclined. This has come – no doubt – as a reaction against the prevailing digital climate. I accord. As would William Morris, who faced a similar industrial challenge.