[Source: Avant Arte | Photos by Jonny Hugh Stewart, Jonny Niesche and others]

Jonny NiescheIn the studio

With his pastel-coloured and meditative paintings, Jonny Niesche has arrived in a modern space that is both flat and multidimensional.

Digital colours and shapes evolve into a physical experience that can be sensed throughout the room. They radiate from the canvas, reflecting an outward sentiment that is received and decoded differently by every viewer. After having painted realistically for a long time, Jonny Niesche’s compositions moved to a place that is comfortingly uncanny and evocative. Now, he mixes colours in his head.

Niesche gently disarms the viewer by apprehending perception, thus inviting engagement on a different level.

Experienced in person, there are moments when the illusion of perfection slightly cracks. As the light travels through time and space, it illuminates the marks which human hands have left on mirroring surfaces. In times of consumer culture, Niesche’s geometrical abstractions are aware that to be flawless is only a seductive illusion.

As a young boy, the artist visits the cosmetic department of a luxury store. It is his earliest experience of colour. Mixing the magical yet guilty memory of mirrors and pigments with his fascination for Debbie Harry, Jonny Niesche took digital samples from the singer’s eye shadow. The resulting series is deeply sensual and inscribed with a symbiosis of male and female energy.

The process is one of osmosis with ongoing strains of interests, reading and swallowing information. Niesche has a voracious appetite for imagery and ideas.

Artworks