James Nelson: Breaking and entering

Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / James Nelson’s immersive drawings in “Glass Breaks,” his current solo show at McKenzie Fine Art, elude formalist analysis. Myriad marks and clusters suggest natural ephemera – microbial cultures, spider webs, and bird nests. But their appearance doesn’t explain them. Without words, they communicate something intangible and decidedly uncomfortable. Their presence demands that they be experienced. They represent the unexpected splintering of a whole, the shattering of existing, assumed continuity.

Nelson speaks about this body of work, made during the four-year period following the sudden death of his father in 2019, as a kind of disappearing act necessitated by that loss and the very real-world demands that his father’s passing placed on him. Emotionally disconnected, his artistic life disrupted, Nelson stopped drawing for a year. Having just completed an exhibition, he wondered how he might find his way back to drawing – and if there would be another show. During this time, Nelson, a New York City artist, took trips to Maine and upstate New York to commune with nature. But it was a visit to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, that was the catalyst for Nelson’s full return to drawing. Inspired by the palace’s intricate geometric patterning and the extraordinary lightness of its architecture, with their suggestions of infinitude, Nelson began working again by embracing its wondrous detail.

Nelson’s way back into his work can come across as groping in the dark, as a heroic attempt to capture the inherent instability of transitional moments. The drawings are thus emotionally complex, and sometimes appear to be headed in very different directions. Yet somehow, they cohere. 

In his press statement, Nelson says that his father had been a lifelong theologian, holding views that Nelson himself was compelled to break with later in his adult life. The rift between father and son was eventually bridged by a shared understanding of the son’s drawings. Over time, drawing became the vehicle, and the language, for their ongoing conversation. These drawings address that connectivity but also engage larger spiritual questions. 

The idea of liminal states between life and death, and death and potential rebirth, comes through in the drawings. Nelson says he hasn’t found words yet for the experience of making them, but that he reaches a threshold “when a mark is made and unmade at the same time, when something forms and vanishes in the same instant.” He asks, “Is there a theological term for when the act of creation is also its opposite?” Nelson’s way of circling back on his father’s theology is to ask eternal questions to which there are no answers. He created these works as an homage to their shared ethos of art. No words are necessary to explain them, but rich common ground is there to experience.

“James Nelson: Glass Breaks,” McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard Street, New York, NY. Through March 3, 2024.

About the author: Kim Uchiyama is an abstract painter whose work is included in numerous public and private collections in the United States and Europe. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts recipient, two-time MacDowell fellow, and a member of American Abstract Artists.