North America

Nolan Simon

Untitled (has sail boats)

2013

Nolan Simon’s Untitled (has sail boats) is a minimalist watercolor painting that interrogates the interplay between language, image, and meaning. The piece prominently features the phrase “has sail boats”, presented in a clean, unembellished font. This text serves as a catalyst for viewer interpretation, prompting questions about context and narrative. Simon’s choice of a simple, declarative sentence creates a sense of ambiguity and open-endedness, inviting the audience to construct their own associations and stories around the phrase. The stark presentation highlights the intrinsic power of language to evoke imagery and emotion, even in the absence of visual representation. By focusing on the textual element alone, Simon underscores how words can conjure vivid scenes and nuanced meanings purely through suggestion. This work challenges the viewer to engage actively with the artwork, exploring the fluid boundaries between text, interpretation, and visual imagination.

Nolan Simon is a figurative painter whose practice reflects and addresses phenomena of image proliferation, the artistic legacy of appropriation and the history of modern painting. As he started working mainly with found images, Noland questioned in his early work principles of authorship, ownership and consent in the age of social media and capitalised content creation. Noland’s realist painting practice then evolved towards a more grounded and intimate take on portraiture and still life based on staged studio scenes and common life situations that he captures in photographs, commonly involving friends and fellow artists. Engaging with a form of reproduction, or even transformation, from still image to painting, Nolan is interested in the pictorial capacity to render and highlight structural qualities in low-quality or often random pictures. A sense of the contemporary borne in the essence of his models is met with references to the history of portraiture from classical to contemporary painting.

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Nolan Simon Untitled (has sail boats)

Nolan Simon

Untitled (has sail boats)