An Amorous Alchemist: Nick Smith’s 'Paramour' Explores Stories of Illicit Love and Erotic Te
A clandestine moment exposed. For many years, even centuries, art and literature have explored love, desire and erotica, something that is natural for a human to feel, yet often not considered morally correct. Love or lust, we all want it but are afraid to see it or consume outside of our imaginations and intimate experiences. However, the boundaries of what is socially acceptable are continuously changing and this is what Nick Smith explores through playing with perspective.
Smith’s ‘colour-chip’ technique uses contemporary images combined with classical erotic lyrics to delve into many dimensions of passion. In the main body of the Paramour series this clandestine moment is exposed visually, or physically as we can see the female form at a distance, but is only truly revealed when one is face to face with the canvas. The lyrics of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or excerpts from the notorious classic novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill convey the illicit story and equally compliment Smith’s image sublimely.
Additionally, Smith’s particular ‘colour-chip’ methodology cleverly uses the iconic The Three Graces with contemporary erotic language, which transforms the series from exploring love and desire to being salacious and bawdy. One may perceive an image to mean something, yet when it is placed with text its meaning may alter from what you have originally perceived. It is shocking but rather humorous to see phrases such as ‘pussy play’ juxtaposed with a Ruben classic. However, one will never know how racy Ruben’s art may have been if he was practicing in today’s contemporary art world.
Smith states; “You can judge a book by its cover, or you can take a closer look and discover other dimensions. Paramour isn’t objectification; it’s celebration of the female form, and of love and desire.”
Smith provokes us to examine closer and immerse ourselves into his work, whether face to canvas or at a distance. The altering perspectives and illusions that Smith creates is what makes the series powerfully compelling. Natural sexual instinct is unveiled but captivating, not indecorous in Paramour. Over 400 years have passed since Shakespeare wrote passionate lyrics - it is admirable to keep classic erotic literature alive in a contemporary context as it shows that people haven’t really changed, just the world around us has.
Your work reminds me of Lincoln in Dalivision. Has your inspiration come from modern masters such as Dali or simply a personal experiment?
I was looking at the immediate fashion photography of Terry Richardson and also Richard Prince with his stolen images from Instagram. My Instagram presents images in a square format with a border, a lot of the images I like best are a Polaroid format. I’m not looking for influence; I don’t see anyone else making anything similar to me. The closest you see is painters influenced by people like Cézanne with that slightly pixelated way of painting. I wouldn’t really say it’s an influence but in the future if you had to draw some sort of art history chronology you could see that my stuff comes after that, if I was privileged enough to be uttered in the same sentence as those artists.
Why do the works especially focus on Shakespeare? When did you first feel immersed into his writing?
My granddad was a great lover of Shakespeare, we’ve still got all his books, the complete works of Shakespeare, at my uncle’s house. I think getting into Shakespeare is one of those milestones in life, I’ve pushed myself to be that little bit more cultured.
I started with what I knew, with the first port of call being Romeo and Juliet. It was nice to re-familiarise myself with that, not so much the story because you often get a similar structure in modern movies, but the language that was used. I was constantly surprised by all the phrases and idiosyncrasies that you get with the English language back then that we still use now. It’s almost a different language but you get a colour of what’s being said. You understand it but your eyes will skip over some of the unfamiliar words. Through that research I found Shakespeare’s sonnets from the ‘Sequence of Youth’, there was 154 of them to choose from. Their format is almost like a haiku but slightly longer, from 120-130 words. The amount of words in the sonnets dictates the size of the image, so the word count from the pages of text told me what size the images were going to be. Then I had to workout the proportion, it’s also done wonders for my times tables, I now know that 19 times 29 is 551, I would have never known that before.
Tell us more about the process in creating the series. How did you come about using the ‘colour chip’ methodology?
It came about through my career as an interior designer, I would work with colour and like any designer I would use paint colour chips as a way of referencing and communicating colour, so as a result I always had these chips of colour around me. After a project I had lots of loose ones so the idea came to me about rearranging them into images, this started as fairly arbitrary images and then I moved on to recreated iconic ones. The firsts artworks I made using this technique were really simple 20cm x 30cm which I sandwiched between glass or stuck down. The chips I use now have an adhesive backing but the early images were rougher, stuck down with blue tack or some double-sided tape.
Your aesthetic stretches perspective and is beautifully illusive. What perspective did you intend to create? And what do you think the most common perspective is of a contemporary audience?
Two point perspective.
The question I’m asking myself is ‘if it’s not erotic art, what is it?’ Many of the pieces are sexually charged but one can also just see a human body. How would you express its genre?
There’s nothing graphic about what I’m doing with these images. I don’t think anyone would enter the National Gallery and say that any of the nudes there were pornography. Years ago you would have extreme people going and smashing penises off marble sculptures and the like but hopefully we’ve moved on from that.
My work is not about pornography or gratuitously explicit images, but about the human form. It’s not objectification; it’s a celebration. The way it connects with the dialogue that runs through it, you will see it’s not just a picture of the naked body; it goes further than that when you get up close and read the text.
Your previous works have referenced Magritte’s The Son of Man and then Ruben’s The Three Graces in this collection. How did you come up with the idea/originality of your own images in Paramour?
The name Paramour came about because the dialogue in the work also pertained to unconsummated love. Paramour by definition means an “Illicit lover, to engage in a romantic or sexual relationship with secretive undertones”. I also like the shape of the word and how it flows elegantly.
What can we expect next?
My next project is aimed at reconnecting my audience with forgotten icons, people who have added something profound and useful to our world. An antidote to the celebrity culture, to being famous because you are famous. I want to discover a mathematical equation which connects these icons in my artwork and provides the structure for the presentation of this project, a fibonacci sequence for predicting future success.
Lily Bennett
Paramour runs until 16th April at Lawrence Alkin Gallery, 42 New Compton Street London WC2H 8DA www.lawrencealkingallery.com
