Looking Forward to Every Season 

Nadir Souirgi

September 12 – October 12, 2024

Opening reception:

Thursday, September 12
6-8pm

David Castillo is proud to present Looking Forward to Every Season, new paintings by Nadir Souirgi and the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Souirgi has long drawn inspiration from the natural world. Both an artist and educator, he founded the Harlem County Bird Club in 2010, introducing his students to birdwatching and scientific education through a compassionate lens —the experience “marked a sea change in my artistic practice…” he said, during a 2021 conversation with the Barnard Center for Research on Women. While Looking Forward to Every Season marks a new visual language, many of the works’ titles are named for environmental features, poetic and reflective of a reverence for nature and a changing climate: Open Mouth at the Mountain; Tide Moon; New Creatures.

Although these are not landscapes, the acrylic paintings do contain worlds of their own: multitudes of illuminated colors, overlaid with blithely gestural mark-making and kinetic patterns that conjure the repetition and propulsive energy of graphic prints. A swath of streaked paint here, a shimmy of the brush there, an ever-present line—but it keeps moving, soaring. The dynamism recalls the shapes and rhythms of Souirgi’s earliest influences, including graffiti, comic books, and music—both the unexpectedly subversive aesthetic of the punk bands he loved and the mélange of samples found in hip-hop and breakbeat.

Indeed, these paintings are amalgamations themselves, though a viewer might not know it upon first glance. Their most evocative feature is an intentionally hypnotic, trick-mirror quality. While the paintings appear stretched, each is comprised of several unstretched canvas tiles, which Souirgi calls “skins”; the skins are made up of layers of canvas, a process that thickens, stiffens, and enables them to better respond to various methods at once. Staggered together, they embody their own individual styles, harmonious in their ebullience—perhaps like the mercurial states of the human body and soul, or the changing of seasons. They’re held by wooden supports, designed by the artist, which he’s named “pallets,” a reference to the global distribution of goods and the use of wood and other natural materials in Euro-American painting traditions—a history Souirgi upends, makes his own. The buttresses are visible, but only when viewed from the side.

To mesmerizing effect, the eye perceives one object, then many, softening a needless separation between surface and substratum, two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture, perception and reality. Souirgi’s work considers notions of authenticity of emotion—both in terms of categorization and gesture—and where those contracts fail. There’s something of nature and humanity itself in these paintings: their unpredictability, their depth.

Nadir Souirgi grew up in New York City and Miami and currently lives and works between New Haven, CT and New York City. His studies include Milton Avery Graduate School of Art, Bard College and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2024). He is the recipient of the art school’s prestigious Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize. His work has been included in recent exhibitions in Miami, New York, Vienna, and Munich; and was first shown by the gallery in 2022.