Nick Goss: “Painting is a high-wire act”

Nick Goss’s recent exhibition, ‘Isle of Thanet’ at Perrotin Paris takes us on a journey through history, memory and imagination. Inspired by a chat with a curator who mentioned that Margate and the surrounding areas were once a separate island from mainland Britain, Goss used this tidbit as a springboard for a new body of work. The paintings explore what it means to live on an island – a place that is both connected and isolated.

But it’s not just about history for Goss. His works weave together all kinds of influences, from ancient mythology to 19th-century paintings, and even T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – which the poet started writing during his time in Margate. Goss brings these elements together in a way that feels like a patchwork of memories, loosely connected yet deeply meaningful. His approach is like flipping through an old photo album where each snapshot tells its own story, but together they form a much bigger picture. In some pieces he mixes everything from photos of London’s East End shops to comic book imagery and ancient statues, all coming together in what he calls “a memory of civilisation.” Pieter-Jan de Paepe speaks with the artist about the story behind his new works.

Hi Nick! First of all congratulations on your exhibition at Perrotin – your first solo show in Paris. The title of the exhibition alludes to the history of the island of Thanet. I find the transition from an island to a mainland enormously fascinating. Analogous to this history, how do you explore concepts of isolation and connection in your work?

Connection has been an important part of this new series. In Passengers and Bread and Puppet crowds of disparate faces are congregating to hear someone speak or a band play. These types of communal situations have drifted into my world quite recently. However, the crowd remains very much a group of individuals, all peering from side to side. There is anxiety present, but also a sense of people coming together. James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels is an important touchstone for the paintings in this series. I’ve been exploring a newfound interest in spiritual connection with these works through the use of astrological symbols in the form of silk screens sampled from the Warburg’s collection of astrological and cosmic imagery. Planets and a large eagle circle the sky behind a relatively mundane terrazzo in Maryland Rock Hotel, an Italian 15th-century etching of a fish swims through the night sky passing by constellations of stars in Overlook. The narrative of these works is that these crowds of people are waiting for a sign from the spiritual world, a cosmic event that will act as a starting gun for them to embark on the journey to the Island.

One of your paintings contains traces of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Like your paintings, this poem has a fragmented structure. Where Eliot achieves that structure through a juxtaposition of different voices and styles, you achieve it through a collage-like construction of techniques and images from different sources. Eliot’s impersonal approach, using multiple voices to convey collective experiences, positions the poet as a mediator of cultural disorder. What is it that you seek to mediate in the construction of your images?

I hadn’t thought about that connection, but I like it a lot. More and more I’m looking to collect a range of different sources and weave them together, such as 1960s comics, 15th-century engravings, images cut out of magazines or newspapers, or a photo taken outside my studio. I like the idea of time and space collapsing in these works. This type of collaging is akin to decoupage in film editing. These changes in language can suggest an unsettling state of impermanence that is important to me in that it resembles aspects of world affairs happening all around us. A phrase that I love to think about when constructing my paintings is the “unconscious memory of civilisation”. It was used by Aby Warburg when he described the archive of images he built up that is now housed in London’s Warburg Institute. The idea of mapping out how images can transmit through time and space is fascinating to me.

In a conversation with Thomas Marks, you praise the unfinishedness and openness in Edvard Munch’s work. Following that, you said that a painting doesn’t actually need that much information, because the more information you put into it, the more removed you become from the actual subject. How do you keep the balance between the openness in your work and the amount of composite sources and images from which your paintings are constructed?

It’s a high-wire act, often I find a painting will become too descriptive of a particular place. Sometimes you can overcook a scene and end up scrapping the painting. Other times, there is a vagueness to the work that transforms into a kind of ambient nothingness that also feels unsatisfactory. Often there is a moment in a painting that locates the viewer – a vase of flowers, a steaming cup of coffee or a buzzing karaoke microphone that has just been placed on the bar. This fulcrum allows the viewer to place themselves in the painting, which earns you a license to play games with perspective, multiple viewpoints and collaging textures to undermine that notion, to slowly pull the carpet away so hopefully, as a viewer, you have to start navigating yourself around the work and decipher the relationships between the various objects in it.

At what point did you begin your journey as a painter, and has your Dutch heritage shaped your artistic approach today?

I remember spending a lot of time in Holland when I was younger. There wasn’t much to do so we drew from art books a lot. My Oma had a strong collection of Der Blaue Reiter and Kirchner books and for a long time – until art school really – that was what I assumed art was. We also spent a lot of time during the summers messing about on the canals, fishing and wandering around the marshy fields and woodland that border the waterways. That part of West Holland near Rotterdam has a peculiar and tentative relationship with nature, the water has to be constantly managed and pumped back into the sea. I think that sense of impermanence and fragility is apparent in both my and my brother’s work. Right next to the bucolic waterways and woods, lining the roads leading to Rotterdam is the harbour. Chimneys rising up over the flat landscape and nighttime images of plumes of smoke and fire all come to mind when I think back on my youth. This dichotomy between industry and nature is also present in nearly all of my work.

Could you share what your studio is like and what a typical day there entails? Do you have a set routine you follow, or does your approach vary from day to day?

The studio is great, it’s essentially a big wooden barn. It feels like a place Neil Young might have recorded an album in, yet it’s right in the heart of East London. There is excellent year-round natural light that is conducive to long days of painting and drawing. I have quite a varied approach –  I think after a certain amount of time I naturally want to change things up and try something new to provoke the paintings into surprising me.

Your work is closely tied to literature. Does your work also function on a narrative level as well?

I think the work involves a lot of storytelling. There is often a protagonist that has just departed stage left, or just out of frame you can tell that trouble is brewing. However, I’m more interested in creating psychological spaces that the viewer themselves can inhabit and bring their own recollections to. If the narrative in the painting is too strong, this inhabitation isn’t possible.

Your work often deals with themes of memory and the past, a subject matter on which one of your favourite writers W.G. Sebald has also written extensively. In his book Austerlitz, revisiting places from his past raises questions about the meaning and reliability of memories. Is that something that resonates with you?

Yes, since the Covid lockdown I’ve been increasingly interested in this idea of the unreliable narrator and whether it’s a concept that can be utilised in painting like it is in so much of my favourite literature. Again, it comes back to setting up a situation in the paintings where the viewer feels comfortable and like they understand where they are. Then slowly you can allow the uncanny to infiltrate the scene and start to place questions in the viewers’ minds about the relationship between certain objects or contexts in the paintings. For example, I didn’t intend a silkscreen of an enormous astrological eagle to fly past a hotel terrace in Maryland Rock Hotel, but when it found its way into the picture it felt odd, but somehow believable.

The science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard is a source of inspiration to you. Where did your fascination with the apocalyptic come from?

It was my brother Phil Goss who gave me a copy of The Drowned World when we were looking to collaborate on a project. I couldn’t believe how painterly the images were in the book and the whole novel can be read as a metaphor for painting or creation itself. Going back to the times we spent in Holland, we would walk in the fields and feel the water move under our trainers. I wonder if the fragility of humans surrounded by nature is a recurring motif because of those early experiences.

Most of your works are large in scale. Does this scale reinforce your idea of what you once called “psychological spaces”? According to you, these spaces play with the concept of the uncanny by providing vague hints that create an alienating atmosphere and invite personal interpretation.

Yes exactly, I try and make smaller works, but often it feels important that the viewer is enveloped in the space. They don’t function as illusionistic portals into another world, but more as theatrical backdrops, with gaps or lacunae in the paintings that the viewer can fall into and become disorientated. The large scale allows the staining and pouring techniques to play off against the mechanical silk screening. I see them akin to wall hangings or collaged fabrics as much as traditional painted spaces.

Can you describe what you love most about painting and in what ways it stands apart from other creative mediums for you?

I love painting and particularly enjoy how tactile it is. I love the ability to manipulate texture and colour to play with the psychology of a space. It’s a medium I strongly associate with improvisation and a type of alchemy. That said, I don’t really see it as standing apart from any other creative medium. I also see it as being entwined with music, film and literature.

Besides being a painter, you’re also a guitarist and have previously mentioned the influence of music in your work. How do you incorporate musical elements into your work? Do you have specific songs or artists that influence you?

It’s a joy to be able to come into the studio, make a coffee and select an album to listen to that sets the tone for the day. The type of music changes with the paintings I’m making, but a few favourites like Brian Eno, Burial and Alice Coltrane always find their way into the day’s selection. In my head, the works have individual musical scores that accompany them. Some are more of a quiet electronic pulse, some have more of a fractured melody. It’s not quite synaesthesia, but there are associations between the colours and the ‘sound’ of the painting that isn’t totally conscious, but you know when the balance is about right.

Finally, I wanted to ask something more light-hearted. If you had the opportunity to choose one artwork to live within your home, which piece would you select, and why?

I’m obsessed with Hannah Höch at the moment; the jump cuts, the severe nature of collaging gets under your skin when world events seem at their most calamitous. There is a collage from 1945 called Eule mit Lupe depicting a celestial owl hovering over the sky holding a magnifying glass. My daughter Isla loves owls and I think she would get a kick out of that work being in the kitchen.