You're in New York, right?

Yes, I’m based in NYC, but I’m not in the city right now. My wife and I just took a little vacation upstate. I was in London for the opening last week and we're just having a holiday week before we go back to work.

Oh, awesome! How was London?

It was amazing. It was actually my first time in London and I had so much fun. I just fell in love with the city. There were over 1000 people that came to the opening and I got to talk to so many of them. I really enjoyed finally meeting everyone at the gallery in person as well.

Is it true that you decided not to work from photographs?

I actually don't work from photos at all. That was something that I started doing a long time ago when I was in school. I just had this weird love-hate relationship with photography, and ended up deciding I didn't want photography to have a real presence in my work.

Do you work with live models?

Yes. Actually, for this Unit show, four paintings were portraits of my close friends who sat with me while I was sculpting with the acrylic paste. After the sculpting process, I paint on top of it with oils. I decided to do that because I wanted the challenge of trying to depict somebody sitting right in front of me since I’m used to working out of my head.

My roots are in traditional painting, where painting comes from observation. I wanted to revisit that. The challenge for me in those portraits was to not necessarily represent the person in their likeness, but to capture their character and their personality. My process is kind of in two parts. The first is sculpting. I work with a really thick mixture of acrylic paste, where I dump this material onto the canvas and I start moving it around, producing these forms and structures that I can interpret as either faces, bodies, or whatever imagery comes up out of the process. I go with it and see where it leads. Sometimes it leads to nothing, and sometimes it leads to really interesting shapes and forms. I carve out the aspects that I want to keep and use for the next step: oil paints.

Do you ever think of the people that might look at your paintings and what they might feel?

It's tough because once I see something in the painting, I can't unsee it, and it's not necessarily the same thing as what other people see. I share a studio with my wife and even when I ask her what she sees, she'll often see something completely different than me. And that's what I love about painting. I love that a viewer can bring their own experience to the work and can see something completely different with it.

…And that happens only when art is completely open and honest.

Yes, and that's really important to me. In the work I’m not so much concerned with illusion. I'm more concerned with physicality and presence. It speaks to people in a different way and it’s really interesting to see it. Even during the opening last week I had so many conversations with people talking about what they see and I'm careful not to tell too much as to what I see.

You come from an artistic family, right?

Yes, my mom is a ceramic artist. I've been making art and sculpting since I was like a kid. I actually have some relatives that are painters. I'm not really close with them, but I have a relative in France who's a painter. He's a still life painter.

Were you born in NYC?

Yes, I’m from New York. New York is incredibly inspiring. It's exhausting and inspiring, but I love it. I couldn't really imagine being anywhere else.

Did you study there as well?

I did, yes. I received my MFA from a school called the New York Academy of Art. It was a very traditional school. It was all working from observation and it was an entirely figurative curriculum. I also did a lot of palette development and I got really interested in all the different types of painting palettes and studying color. My love of color really blossomed while I was there.

It's very hard to choose the right colors

Yes, and you have a choice, right? You can work with colors that oppose each other and then that's a whole different dynamic. I'm really interested in the way color influences interpretation.

Did you discover your own color by studying other artists?

I can't say that I studied any particular artist’s palette. I think a lot of my color just comes from kind of like painting as flesh, painting the body. There is every color under the sun, every color in the spectrum can be found in the human body.

In school, I would go to the art store and find colors I liked and then mix them with other colors and just got a real understanding of how color behaves on the palette and then on the surface of the painting and how colors react with one another and how to mix a color without losing its vibrancy.

Depending on what color I put down, it'll influence the entire piece. There's a painting in the show in Unit called "The Tipping Point" and it's this big red abstract painting and you can't tell in the photos, but when you're seeing in person on all the curves of the form, there's little pieces of this, like neon green that is showing through. And that was the first acrylic wash that I put on it. But like all the reds react differently just because they have these little bits and pieces and edges of this green. And it's those kinds of subtleties that I'm really drawn to, not just in my work, but in painting in general, like a subtle use of color that really can only be seen in person.

You're not scared at all trying new things and breaking the rules…

Honestly there's no fear in trying new things. There's no fear in failure. I think as an artist, you really have to embrace failure. That's where all the growth comes from. What is it like working on a painting for 50 hours and then you have to throw it out because it didn’t work? How do you bring that experience to the next work? How do you bring that experience into your life in general, not just in the studio? Being an artist allows me to see things differently than I would have if I was doing anything else.

The great painters are explorers, and psychological explorers as well

Absolutely. When I was in London, I was at the National Gallery and I was looking at this Velasquez painting of King Philip IV of Spain. And the most basic portrait, like kind of no frills. The king is just sitting there, right? Like a very conservative portrait, he is just sitting there in his royal clothing. But his face… It's just the most incredible portrait and I sat in front of it for so long. Everything that's going on, every human condition, all of the stress, all of the weight that he must have as a king. And when you think about it, it's like, how is this painting, this picture able to convey all of these emotions? To me, it's like this static painting. It's just amazing that art has the power to do that. And I think painters in general that are dealing with the human form really have a unique ability to convey the psychological aspect of their subjects. And obviously, I think that's also what people are so drawn to. We're drawn to things that we have an emotional connection to and even abstract work can be like that as well. I don't think it’s specifically tied to figuration, but certainly as animals, humans are drawn to other humans. So yes, I think psychology plays a really important role. I mean also Francis Bacon's work, I'm obviously hugely influenced by him and he was a very psychological painter. His ability to just capture that animal aspect of human nature was really incredible.

How do you choose your subjects?

So there are four portraits that are of my very close friends. Those are unique because that was the first time I did that where I had them sit for me. But the other figures and characters that I paint, it's really just me reacting with the material during that first sculpting process. So I don't worry too much about what the subject might look like. It's whatever happens in the moment on the canvas. When I'm painting, I try not to think as much as I can. I just really try to get into this zone where I'm not really thinking about what I'm doing. I'm just giving myself completely to the work in front of me. If I start thinking about things like What is this person going to be like? Is this color the right color? Is this shape the right shape?… Then I stall and I just start overthinking things. So it's better to just have a clear mind and let whatever's going to happen, happen.

You mentioned that you work with your wife, does she tell you her opinion on your work? She does, yes. She's sitting across from me doing work. I often ask her opinion. If it's an opinion that I don't like, I don't listen to it and I tell her to go back to work (haha). I really appreciate that she's not a painter, she's a clothing designer and she has a very good eye for color as well. I appreciate her feedback a lot because it gives me something to work off of.

Nicolas Holiber for French Fries Magazine issue 5

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