Nicolas Africano: Boy
Boy
Nancy Hoffman Gallery
May 15–July 3, 2025
New York
Nicolas Africano’s diminutive replicas of youthful male acrobats are, among other things, explorations of the viewer’s response to the real replicated at small scale. The hands, feet, musculature, and faces of the little beings are reproduced so faithfully, we can almost see them breathing. But the smaller the sculpture gets, the less it mirrors the viewer’s presence and the more it tends towards expressing a narrative. Africano’s narrative is drawn from Pablo Picasso’s enigmatic series of “Acrobat” paintings from the turn of the twentieth century, such as Young Acrobat on a Ball and Young Acrobat and Child, both from 1905. Picasso’s “Acrobats” was a cycle of paintings which presented an odd subcategory of society: impoverished families of athletic performers—Saltimbanques—who could flip, dance, and contort themselves for their audience’s amusement. There are elements of danger and refined skill that mark the acrobat, as well as the sympathy and admiration they prompt in the eye of the artist and viewer.
Nicolas Africano, A Talent to Amuse (High Wire), 2025. Graphite, gouache on recycled paper, 11 x 8 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Nancy Hoffman Gallery.
Africano distills the story down to a boy; he is intrigued by the physical possibilities of the figure standing, sitting, or in repose with his sparse costume and accoutrements of play. It is the most basic form of entertainment simply to watch a person move. Africano and Picasso savor the opportunity to gaze at the static form of an acrobat at rest. The sculptures Aliki, Boudari, and Kolymbithres (all 2023–25) present a youthful male figure in contrapposto pose, while Santa Maria (2023–25) sits on a dark brown glass cube and Tripiti (2023–25) rests against a glowing blood red orb. Potential energy informs both Picasso’s and Africano’s assessments of the body, as opposed to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s or Georges Seurat’s more tense and animated depictions of circus performers.Africano’s works on paper engage movement: A Talent to Amuse (High Wire) and A Talent to Amuse (High Wire/Bar) (both 2025) depict the male figure balancing effortlessly on a wire that crosses the bottom of the paper horizontally, mimicking its lower edge. A Talent to Amuse (Hoops) (2025) shows him in a gentle “S” curve, while a series of fragile rings seem to vibrate down his lower body. The faces in the gouache paintings reference Picasso’s palette; they are pale with expansive highlights and delicately modeled. There is a gentle and calm serenity in the face’s disposition, with half-closed or downcast eyes. The same is true of the semi-transparent flesh tones of Africano’s bronze sculptures: these beings are either lost in their activities or seem aware of our gaze and are distant and slightly disdainful of our interest. In A Talent to Amuse (Ring of Fire) and A Talent to Amuse (Snow Globe) (both 2025) the figure is inscribed in a ring and a sphere respectively, the latter image transforming the person into a toy, a literal object of entertainment. In A Talent to Amuse (Globe) (2025), Africano reproduces the set-up of Picasso’s Young Acrobat on a Ball (1905) but leans in heavily toward the geometry of sphere and figure—adding the hexagonal pattern of the paper towel with which he blots the fluid background of the gouache—for good measure.
The juxtaposition of geometry and human form arises naturally from the acrobat’s profession: either from the choreographed arcs and circles in which he must move or the tools of his trade, rings and juggling/balancing balls. For Picasso, these take a back seat to the costume of the performer and the abjectness of his lot. Africano sheds the social implications of the Saltimbanques, instead choosing a healthy, if not ethereal, beauty. Each sculpture engages with a sphere, except for the aforementioned Santa Maria (2023–25), who sits on a cube, and Boudari (2023–25), who holds a voluminous white robe, which seems to be obscuring something, probably another sphere. Like the frequent Renaissance conceit, deployed by Michelangelo and Bronzino, of the grotesque face positioned next to the youth to emphasize its prized and fleeting nature, the cubes and spheres seem calculated to bring out the young acrobat’s complicated and flowing musculature, the body’s hardness and softness, and the mysterious bony substructure that can be the source of transient beauty. There is the opacity and dullness of bronze posited against the glowing transparency of the glass, as well. The viewer’s own nostalgia for visits to the circus, a love of pre-Cubist Picasso, and appreciation of youth and all the potential it holds all swirl together in Africano’s boys, reminding us that art often hinges on narrative types, and we don’t need to let them go.
William Corwin is a sculptor and writer based in New York. Besides the Rail, he writes regularly for Art & Antiques and Art Papers. He is an avid opera fan.
SOLITUDE: THE NECESSITY OF ART
Opens Friday, November 1, 2024
The only exhibition to highlight nearly 175 years of American art in the examination of ideas and perspectives of solitude, Solitude: The Necessity of Art features a bold selection of art from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and with the assistance of the Art Bridges Foundation.
Included is one of only 100 known paintings by Regionalist painter, Grant Wood, a playfully interactive work by conceptual art giant, John Baldessari, and the sobering 1918 work Return of the Useless by early 20th century American realist, George Bellows. The works included in Solitude: The Necessity of Art explore inspirational themes of self-actualization and inspire a search for a communal sense of belonging.
The varied formal approaches in this exhibition reveal art’s true ability to transform through subjects that are both reticent and challenging. The captivating stare of Ammi Phillips’ 19th century, pre-suffrage female portrait, the psychological compression of photorealist painter, Richard Estes’ remote locale of Maine’s Acadia Park and the provocative implications of Andy Warhol’s invented still-life Hammer and Sickle all weigh heavy in the quest for inner strength and individuality while inciting the need for intimacy and human connection.
Consequently, the delivery and interception of artistic language of all kinds become paramount in Peoria Riverfront Museum’s first exhibition which celebrates the creative act as solace for the solitary.
Solitude: The Necessity of Art features an array of multi-disciplinary programming designed to elicit the discovery of inner strength and individuality.
As a bonus, a focused suite of Nicolas Africano sculpture, painting and drawing which constitute new and recent acquisitions illuminating the arc of his fifty-plus year career are highlighted as a self-contained special project within this exhibition. This selection features newly added works from the Heintzman Collection Promised Gift, which have never before been exhibited at Peoria Riverfront Museum.
Solitude: The Necessity of Art is sponsored by Art Bridges Foundation with additional support from Bielfeldt Foundation, Visionary Society, Friends of Art, and Illinois Arts Council.
Generously lent by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art as part of Art Bridges’ Partner Loan Network.
Pieces by Nicolas Africano sponsored by Oak River Foundation, Visionary Society, Illinois Arts Council
Greta Garbo inspires rare Minneapolis exhibit by international artist Nicolas Africano:
By Alicia Eler, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis), June 7, 2018
It’s unusual for reclusive artist Nicolas Africano to be so chatty, but last Friday morning, before the opening of his first solo exhibition in 13 years, he was in a social mood.
Clad in loose-fitting black linen, the soft-spoken 69-year-old artist was ready for his closeup. His wife and frequent muse, Rebecca, and three sons all were on their way to the Twin Cities to see his series of glass sculptures, based on Cecil Beaton’s photographs of Greta Garbo as Pierrot the clown, a comically tragic character from Italian commedia dell’arte.
The eight sculptures, ranging from 2 to 4 feet tall, made their presence known inside the gray-walled Weinstein Hammons Gallery. A back room was filled with six drawings and sketches that Africano used to create the Garbo series.
Africano said he always thought the Beaton photos “had a certain powerful charm and resonance. ... I had always been interested in the aspect of ‘role.’ I had never had a sense of belonging anywhere, of being a part of the community. I have never been comfortable. I have never experienced a sense of faith or certainty.”
In displaying Africano’s fascination with Garbo, his glass figures become stand-ins for the self.
Pierrot’s heart is always being broken. He desires the love of Columbine (another commedia character) but she usually leaves him for Harlequin. In re-staging Pierrot with the famous Garbo, there’s a strong sense of both drag and androgyny. Different poses make each of Africano’s fantastic glass sculptures distinct — variations on themselves, in a sense. The 2018 work “Garbo Figure (seated figure leaning on a cube)” is doing exactly that, her hands crossed over her chest, face looking downward.
These are not replicas of the Garbo photos. They are all “various poses that I invented and blended together,” said Africano. “After certain variations occur, they have nothing to do with the original inspiration.” The only work that refers directly to a Beaton image is a drawing called “The Chair.”
All but the largest sculpture — “The Garbo Figure,” which stands at about 45 inches — were cast by artist Melanie Hunter at NA Studios in Normal, Ill., the central Illinois city where Africano lives and works. (He was born in Kankakee, south of Chicago.) Hunter and Africano, who have been working together for 25 years, use an olive or dark green-colored glass, though in photographs it often looks black. The reason is simple: to heighten the visibility of the clown’s white outfit, with its poofy, ruffled neckband.
In his work, Africano said, “there is always this sense of opposition between something that it appears to be and what it may really represent. The image called ‘Smile,’ for example, is obviously an effort to refuse to cry.”
Normal, Ill., isn’t the kind of place you’d expect a famous artist to live, but it has a sense of calm that he desires.
Africano, who was represented by art dealer and pop icon Holly Solomon in the 1980s and ’90s, was a well-known name in the New York art world. He was in six group shows at the Museum of Modern Art from 1977 to 1987. The artist has a long relationship with Minneapolis art institutions. Walker Art Center director Martin Friedman gave him his first solo exhibition, “The Man Who Lived in a Hat,” in 1978, when Africano was 27. For Africano, the Twin Cities offers a sense of home and individualism that he finds familiar. Or perhaps it’s the open-mindedness of Minnesotans.
Before this exhibition, his wife had been his model for glass sculptures based on poses she did — a woman with an androgynous look.
“I had for years always been deeply impressed and interested in identities that were blended,” said Africano. “The androgyny of certain figures in art — my wife — there is a certain kind of beauty that always impressed me.”
Twins have also been a theme in Africano’s work; his wife, in fact, is an identical twin. One could see that in the Garbo sculptures, too, re-imagined and multiplied until Africano himself is satisfied by their existence.
Fire and Math: in love in spite of every fact
The work is, as Ezra Pound said of poetry, "An emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time." So, the work is very simple and direct, something that happens in an instant, and yet it asks to be read because of this complexity. It is a "fabric," it is woven.
The work is seductive, and yet it is indifferent to whether anyone is seduced or not. It is about desire, but also scorn, even contempt. It wants you to come to it, but it also claims that it doesn't need you.
The work is vulnerable, as if it were confessing an ancient and obscure hurt and that confession opens it to more hurt. The work is heartfelt but inconsolable. The work is trying very hard to be brave.
But then the work distances itself from the rawness of feeling by insisting that it is dependent upon art traditions. It is about Pierrot, it derives its imagery from Cecil Beaton's photographs of Garbo, and any confession of "obscure hurt" are beside the point. This apparent irony--meaning something other than what it seems to be saying--is not an end in itself, although it is necessary.
These two elements, complex in themselves, create a kind of dissonance that, like music, seeks resolution. Like music, the work is emotionally engaging while being dependent on a specific techniques and traditions. It is fire and math, or perhaps the better word here is calculation. This is very calculating work that would, under different circumstances, prefer to cry.
Finally, the work becomes beautiful, performs its own notion of the beautiful. It succeeds in a way that can only happen after a lifetime of trying. In the end human feeling and art history become one thing, a thing that transcends its own personal and aesthetic sources. There is something sublime about these figures, something yearning. In spite of all human difficulties and complexities, the work becomes spiritual. The work's overwhelming gracefulness--a gracefulness it achieves in spite of the inherent difficulties of working with a material as brittle as glass--is also an acknowledgment of grace, a grace that it achieves with others, with Pierrot and Beaton and Garbo, and, by implication, with the whole history of art, and the whole human history of human frailty, "of being lost, placeless, purposeless, faithless, disillusioned."
Its ultimate secret, its triumph, is that it is in love in spite of every fact.
-Curtis White, Author and Essayist (2018)
The Performing Fool
"From Stravinsky’s Petrouchka to Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West, the performing fool as surrogate for the self-doubting artist has been a resurfacing theme in Nicolas Africano’s work.Commedia dell’arte, the improvisational theatre of stock character types born in the 16th century—whose echoes are felt from Shakespeare to vaudeville to the sitcom—introduced among others the persona of Pierrot, the bumbling and unlucky performer. Quite importantly, the commedia featured also the first professional actresses. In Themes and Variations: the Garbo figures, Africano melds the mime and the aloof enchantress, male and female, reinvesting the already inscrutable Pierrot of Antoine Watteau into three dimensions."
-Barry Blinderman (2018)