Review
- A casual glance at Nicolas Russell’s paintings bring to mind Abstract Expressionism, but first impressions can be misleading. Compared with his earlier work, amplified, full framed photography expressing the universality of the human condition, his paintings, imbued with the bravura gestures inherent in Neo Expressionism, intensifies the dialogue between his photographs and paintings, their surface and depth, the real and the ideal by abstracting reality and charging it with the boisterous colors of graffiti and street art, combining their serpentine rhythms and buoyant spatiality with his mastery of pictorial effect.
- Russell has so assimilated photographic vision that his painted work becomes even more prismatic, dancing with throbbing life in layers of surface and repetition of boisterous strokes of thick pulsating pigment. Thus, Russell has created a pictorial oeuvre so richly layered in both content and substance that it might serve rather like an archaeological tool for recording the primal forms of human consciousness and legend.
- dori nelson, houston tx