Patel brown Gallery | 21 Wade Ave

Nicholas Bierk | A Distant Light

January 8 - February 5 2022

Within A Distant Light are wanderings that span across glowing landscapes, resting bodies, and shadows lingering on walls. Nicholas Bierk considers them sketches — each compact canvas like a page in a journal — rendering itinerant, painterly explorations that move from place to place, from time to time, dispersed to dissolve any concise narrative or chronology. Bierk is the wanderer, slipping into his far and near past, gathering images while he goes.

In A Distant Light, Bierk’s precise landscapes erode to embrace softer explorations of light and shadow. Veiled in dark broadcasts, a vagueness sets in that compels the senses to rise, creating psychologically charged and emotive works. Warm windows and horizons, obscured in darkness, shine from afar. Such places are felt more than they are seen. For Bierk, this ambiguity speaks to the intangible and enduring experience of grief, its harsh contours smoothed overtime. Like the outlines of a mountain that one returns to again and again — its shape is known, its details familiar, known so well it’s as if it’s within you while still far away —yet each transition of light to dark will effect and envelop it differently, speaking to broader cycles of time, love, and relationships both in loss and in remembrance. 

A sense of ephemerality hovers over all the works. The moon will soon be covered by passing clouds; a candle will be blown out; a cat will jump; and the sun will set. Yet such transitionary moments are fused with stabilizing forces of patterns and rhythms that are rooted in nature, relationships, as well as in the act of painting. Bierk approaches them with reverence, here depicted as a glowing spider in its minutely woven web, the vast repeated rippling of water, and the steady breath of someone sleeping. Reaching towards an ever distant light is like an act of seeking, along which things will always be found, intended or not. In Nicholas Bierk’s A Distant Light there is solace in that distance and joy in what is gathered along the way.

— Clara May Puton