I’ve known Nathan since 2008. I had just graduated from art school, and a mutual friend hooked me up with a job working for the same artist Nathan was working for at the time. On the first day of work, Nathan had me traverse Lower Manhattan with him, popping into storefront after storefront, running errands, getting niche photo equipment and overpriced sandwiches. I was a bright-eyed and ambitious kid, with rheumatoid arthritis, who had only ever moved at my own pace when visiting the big city from Central Jersey for three-plus years. Nathan was from Dallas, but whatever remnants of a drawl that were perhaps once there had been flushed away after a few years of criss-crossing the five boroughs. He walked at the speed of a laid-back gazelle and talked at the speed of a hungry coyote. Sometimes I felt like I could hardly keep up with him. When I first met Nathan, his work was rooted in a more self-referential conceptual practice that utilized photography and had its own whimsical, intuitive logic; in only a few years, he had become a painter (of sorts)?! Now, eleven years have passed since I left New York for Los Angeles, and he and I are both fathers. I often think about how parenthood affects us all, both personally and professionally. Being an artist often innately feels like being a dog owner – you love your practice more than anything, but you are also obligated to tend to it as much as you possibly can and prove to it that you seriously, genuinely love it. Then, if and/or when you become a parent, everything slows down. Your priorities shift; your preferences and tendencies do, as well. You grow and evolve in countless, unpredictable ways. There aren’t really any metaphors to accurately and appropriately illuminate this extraordinarily intimate metamorphosis. It can make one feel rushed or lost or lazy or pathetic; it can make one question everything they are doing, and everything they have done. Or it can give one an extreme burst of energy and a fresh outlook on life; it can make one question everything they are doing, and everything they have done (but in a good way). Nathan’s newest pieces, on view here at Sarah Brook Gallery, are simultaneously the most painterly and the most photo-referential things I’ve ever seen him make. And this is what we’re all seeking to eventually, ultimately achieve, right? That is, all of us creative folks want our interests and pursuits to match our talent and knowledge and have everything all come together in some unexpected, holistic manner in order to thoughtfully and properly express our ideas and opinions. When I encounter a painting like “Spooky Action from a Distance,” for example, I have to take it in – all of it – and I encourage others to do the same. It’s not common that we have the opportunity to see something at once be so full of positive life and free movement, while also being intensely enrapturing, almost suffocating – and I think that is what I’m talking about with the desire for the unexpected, holistic achievement. Nathan is slipping into a strange sexiness with these oil-on-linen images, whether he knows it or not, and I am all for it. At first glance, these are abstractions, but so is everything at first glance. You can see arms and a torso and botanical snapshots; dozens of little moments reveal more to you the more you zone in and out of the worked surfaces. The pastel scratches and schmears draw you in and keep you still. And maybe after all those years of walking like a laid-back gazelle and talking like a hungry coyote, Nathan agrees with what Dave Longstreth once wrote: “Stillness is the move.” -Keith J. Varadi, July 2024 Image: Nathan Dilworth "Spooky Action From A Distance" _______ If we’re being completely honest, it’s nearly impossible to truly know what another person is ever thinking or feeling. When we are inside our own perceived borders – the ones we know, the ones with which we are familiar – do we even understand ourselves? When we slip through the semi-structures that surround us in every direction, can we possibly understand anyone else? So much of communication is about effort. Sometimes language is too casual, too colloquial; sometimes it’s too overbearing, too overwrought. It can be tough to know how or when to pull back or push through. This is why creating images can be so powerful; but then again, without explanation, we leave a lot up to and for interpretation. You open any newspaper or publication, and it’s mostly op-ed pieces masquerading as objective journalism. There isn’t much room for interpretation, and the direct subjectivity can be nauseating. Life is supremely weird and complex, and everything feels mashed up on ultra-speed these days. Korean tacos, the Charli XCX-Lorde remix, Bravo crossover shows, the list goes on. But then you occasionally come across the work of an artist like Siro Cugusi, who has chosen to channel the process of alchemy with the title of his first solo exhibition at Sarah Brook Gallery. He slows things down and works and reworks ideas, like a modernist improvising to the magical musings of jazz, but without the fully feigned romanticism of the past. It’s refreshing to see someone embrace the rhythm of improvisation and allow what’s old to become new and what’s new to become old. Here, in Athanor, there is an expansive grouping of primarily black-and-white drawings with occasional colors sprinkled in to pop here and there, like goth in reverse. There are two sizes of varying compositions, and there are plenty of allusions to the real world – a more still life, if you will – but everything is suspended in some sort of tense yet sublime fantasy realm. When I spent time looking at (and into) these complicated framed pictures while standing in Sarah’s front space, what did I interpret? Rube Goldberg feeling the squeeze? Drama! Pinwheel head? Pinhead! Prehistoric wax star, strutting with sex appeal? Hollywood! A nipple, a speaker, a fisherman trying to seek her? Crime! How about you? What do you see? -Keith J. Varadi, July 2024