Ingleby | Nick Goss | Smickel Inn, Balcony of Europe

Nick Goss (b. Bristol, 1981) is an Anglo Dutch painter whose (essentially figurative) paintings suggest apparently contradictory readings. On one hand there is the recognisable specificity of objects and environments rooted in factual, documentary reality: a photographic starting point perhaps, or an archival image offering an intensely palpable sense of place or experience. On the other there is always something more liminal at play - an uncertainty and otherness that never quite explains itself. As Goss puts it, ‘I love that permanence and instability, it is what I’m really interested in. The sense that the past is very close, that you can almost touch it’.

It is in this ambiguity and sometimes dreamlike strangeness that these images reveal their power and presence. They have an unreliable relationship to time, being connected to memory and a kind of nostalgia, and yet existing precisely in their own moment. They are built slowly, wet on wet, in thin layers of often muted pigment over screen-printed images, with small shifts of focus that simultaneously coalesce and fragment. At times they slide towards abstraction in form, but never in mood, which almost always remains resolutely tangible.