Portrait with Red Flowers
2020 Soft pastel on linen 140.2 x 110.2 x 3.2 cm / 55 1/4 x 43 3/8 x 1 1/4 in
‘I love using this very concentrated black, it really doesn’t reflect any lights and create a very intense space in the painting.’—Nicolas Party
‘In this particular portrait I used the black for the background as well as the background of the flower shirt. The portrait is floating in a space where light doesn’t go.’ –Nicolas Party
Born in Lausanne in 1980, Nicolas Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.