Collection: Nicole Tijoux

ABOUT NICOLE TIJOUX

Nicole Tijoux was born in Santiago de Chile and graduated with a Master's Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Chile, with a scholarship awarded by FONDART. Subsequently Nicole was awarded residencies by the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New Berlin, New York, United States in 2016, and by Artemarca in Illabela, Brasil in 2017. Nicole has exhibited regularly in Chile and and abroad, most notably her recent 'Apnea' solo exhibition at the 'Centro de Extension' Gallery, University Catholic of Santiago, Chile.

Nicole's work focusses on the visual transformations that occur when the human figure interacts with water. Water and background act as a veil for the human body and the vast expanses of space that encapsulate the form are explored in her beautifully composed and rendered paintings. Her work attempts to address the concept of changing states and the immediacy of this visual change, captivating a moment and translating it onto the canvas.

The expansive spaces within her paintings are there to communicate the smallness and insignificance of the human form in relation to the vastness of the ocean and all that it encapsulates. Nicole's works address ideas of space, silence and solitude, where our visual form blends with the water.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"Since my BA (2005) I have been working in painting, interested in different translation processes from photos to the canvas, especially when the light and its reflections on the surface of the water activates our ways of seeing in many different forms: the sunlight bouncing incandescently leaving you dazzled, human figures merging with the sea until they almost disappear, pool or dense aqueous medium dissolving such figures into fragments.

I started taking photos of swimmers in pools, as means to try several compositions. The figures, the lines underwater, shadows and particles of colour were then translated through oil painting but omitting some information about them in order to focus on how the fragments behave in the moving surface of the water. At the same time, I used one single colour to refer to the background of the figure, a flat and traceless colour field whose emptiness created a tension with the full detail figure scattered."