Nick Smith: Paramour

Polonius, watching Hamlet talk nonsense, decides there is “method in’t”. Nick Smith borrows the line as an epigraph for his new show, and it fits him well. His pictures look, from across a room, like soft, slightly blurred images. Up close they turn out to be grids of small colour swatches, each one labelled, each one placed according to a rule.

Paramour is Smith’s second solo show at the Lawrence Alkin Gallery in London’s West End. His first, in January 2015, sold out. This time he has turned from art history to literature, and specifically to writing about desire. The timing is deliberate: 2016 marks four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, and the Bard’s poems and plays sit at the centre of the show.

The colour chip

Smith’s signature method uses colour chips of the kind found on a paint manufacturer’s sample card, each a small square of flat colour with a name printed beneath it. Arranged in a grid and seen from a distance, the chips resolve into an image, much as pixels do on a screen. Up close, the names on the chips can be read.

He has explained how the idea first came to him, and it goes back to the days of dial-up internet. Images then loaded slowly, a few pixels at a time, and he became fascinated by how little information the eye actually needs to recognise a picture. Glimpsed at an angle, or out of the corner of the eye, a very low-resolution image can sometimes tell you as much as a sharp one seen straight on. The colour-chip pieces began as a personal experiment with that threshold, and the move towards nudes followed naturally from it: the body is the image the eye is quickest to recognise from the least information.

Word counts

What has changed for Paramour is how the text now controls the picture. Each chip carries one word of a chosen passage, so the length of the passage fixes the number of chips. A poem of 140 words becomes a work of 140 chips. Smith gave an example of the arithmetic: a passage of 551 words has to become an image 19 chips wide and 29 high, and that grid has to suit whatever image he wants to set in it.

He admitted that the process involves some trial and error, and a certain amount of alchemy. Some pairings of text and picture work, others do not. The moment he waits for is the one where a passage and an image fit each other, and only then can he start to build the piece.

The texts

The show draws on Shakespeare’s sonnets alongside Romeo and Juliet and Venus and Adonis. Around them Smith has gathered a broader library of love and lust: D.H. Lawrence, John Cleland, whose Fanny Hill spent much of its life banned, the classical myths as retold by E.M. Berens, and the novels of Sarah Waters. The images are modern nudes, and the pairing of centuries-old verse with contemporary bodies is where much of the show’s energy lies.

In total Paramour has 28 original works, ten of them suggestive nudes. A second group turns the idea round: portraits of classic authors, each built from a passage of modern erotic fiction in which the name of the lead character has been replaced by the name of the writer shown. The effect is playful and slightly mischievous, putting famous and serious faces inside stories they never wrote.

Celebration, not objectification

Smith is aware of how a show of nudes can be received. His answer is that the work invites the viewer to look twice: judge the cover if you like, or come closer and read what the picture is made from. He described the show as a celebration of the female form, of love and of desire, and was clear that he does not see it as objectification.

The previous show asked viewers to recognise famous paintings through the chips. This one asks them to read, which is a harder and more intimate thing to ask of a gallery visitor, and a natural step for an artist who has always built his pictures out of words.

Paramour runs from Friday 18 March to Saturday 16 April 2016. The gallery is at number 42 on New Compton Street, WC2H 8DA.