Galleries in Paris

Nick Goss’s exhibition of new works at Perrotin Paris (his first solo show in Paris and with the gallery) has a history, or more precisely, a genealogy. “Walpole Bay” is the product of numerous kinships and genetic peculiarities, whose lineage has been freely arranged by the artist’s imagination. The island’s name, Thanet, comes from the Greek Thanatos, the mythological personification of death. Goss allowed his mind to roam freely, marrying death and insularity while drawing inspiration from The Isle of the Dead, five paintings of the same subject created by Arnold Böcklin between 1880 and 1886. From a genealogical perspective, their relationship is that of a distant cousin: Goss did not copy Böcklin’s island but rather captured a “feeling” evoked by the series–the way the subject is framed and the general shape of the island. In the lower right, he added the bow of a motorboat : the framing of the scene suggests that we (the viewers) are standing on the boat, a strategy borrowed from Gustave Caillebotte’s La Partie de bateau (1877) and various other Impressionist painters. The boat invites us to “enter” the scene (to board the painting!), like the intercessors in Flemish painting, and as we enter, the island’s rocky cliffs come into view. They reveal traces of screen–printed text (from the poem The Waste Land, written by T.S. Eliot during his convalescence in Margate in 1921) and drawings (people crossing the ocean borrowed from a 1558 engraving in the Walburg collection illustrating a 16th – century Italian poem, as well as motifs on a rug that Goss photographed and then screen – printed). The genealogy of Isle of Thanet also includes a plethora of sketches and cliff drawings made by the artist during his stays on the island.