Nick Mauss

Crumpled aluminum panels silk-screened with obscure photographic imagery litter the floor at Nick Mauss’s solo installation, their rolled and torn surfaces revealing glimpses of partly hidden images on their reverse sides. The twenty-six works are splayed in front of evenly hung glazed ceramic paintings and framed drawings that seem arrested in midcomposition or just as they begin to cohere. The tangles of graphics in those media, too, nimbly approach coherence and then retreat from it; their opacity in the expansive, unlettered gallery space—in which no certain verbal, representational, or allusive images resolve—struggles with an apparent introversion that foregrounds their subjectivity while resisting specific reference. Even their titles—voice over, 2011; Room in a Seashell, 2012—sound like scraps of found verbiage among the aluminum-work debris, their irregular capitalization suggesting context just out of reach. (The dandyish poise of this language—like the trim grays with brief tears of color that appear in the work—has a hollow internal resonance, like the names of fashion editorials.)

In works on paper, such as conversion, 2011, the tension between a coy grid and the violently interrupted mark records a more vertiginous relationship between the artist and his self-presentation than is revealed by the messy studio act. What seems to be on trial here is the potential of drawing itself—both in its powers for objective representation and in its staging of the artist. Even the aluminum panels are given as thrown-off sketches, and, rather than “liberating” drawing from two dimensions, they seethe in their entanglement with the horizontal. Mauss has said his work has a “built-in illegibility,” and this vagueness shows itself to be a mysterious, potent imminence capable of short-circuiting the conception of drawing as either “grapheme” or “matrix.” As Wallace Stevens said, “the poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”