CYCLE, 2018, Rosewood Gallery, Cambodia

CYCLE, solo exhibition, 1 June – 1 September 2018

Cycle surveys one decade of Cheanick’s artistic practice, from early figurative drawing studies to recent abstract paintings, and is themed around both physical and transcendental regeneration.

“I don’t create anything new; I just transform what exists. What I learn from people and my environment is collected and combined into one painting,” says the artist.

Influenced by meditation and the breathing cycle as a tool for greater awareness, Nov is interested in the undefined boundaries of perception. The evolution of his work attests to this. During his education, he gravitated away from the strict brushwork of realism and towards abstraction. He sought less control and predictability, abandoning the brush completely in favor of painting with a traditional wooden broom. His process became physical, emotive and responsive.

Over the years, his references and images have become increasingly abstract. From a palette of mostly muted, dark and earthen colors, to his most recent gray zones. Nov’s densely layered surfaces deliberately blur both the subject and the perception of figure and ground. Nevertheless, no matter how imageless his canvases may seem, they remain representational. There are human and animal figures, bodies of water, and states of being. There are skies, the earth, and maps; there is rain and what follows.

Nov Cheanick’s dynamic surfaces, accompanied by his poetic words, bring the viewer closer to the ways in which he challenges the limits of perception, merging conscious and unconscious worlds, with his mind and his heart in his paintings.

Erin Gleeson, curator.