ART CITIES: London-Arcmanoro Niles

Arcmanoro Niles is a New York-based artist whose brightly hued paintings offer views of his daily life. He introduces little elements of hallucinatory surrealism into otherwise realist paintings through a dramatic play with color, texture, and light, as well as the integration of marginal characters he calls “seekers” who reflect subliminal urges and desires. Often incorporating reflective paints and glitter to enliven the surface of his canvases and those depicted, Niles infuses his quietly mundane scenes with an electrifying vulnerability.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Drawing upon a variety of genres, including portraiture, landscape, and still life, the works in Arcmanoro Niles’ exhibition “You Know I Used To Love You but Now I Don’t Think I Can: There Ain’t No Right Way To Say Goodbye Again“ examine what it means to say goodbye to people, places, and behaviors. Across the exhibition, Niles employs an expressive color palette as he depicts moments of quiet rupture: experiencing loss and heartbreak, aging, leaving home, giving up habits. Vividly capturing feeling and mood, the artist draws upon his own experiences primarily as a means of connecting to others. The artist’s works are highly personal in their content, and Niles often depicts emotionally charged memories and scenes as he charts a record of contemporary existence that is simultaneously intimate and collective. “Painting has been a way for me to approach topics that I felt like I couldn’t talk about growing up and things I feel like we don’t always know how to talk about now,” the artist stated. “I think a lot about how people deal or cope with aging, loneliness, heartbreak, and love. A lot of my paintings are reflections on these things”. For Niles, figuration offers a way into suggesting shared emotional experiences. The artist often depicts his subjects in moments of solitude and contemplation. “Growing Up May Be The Hardest Thing I Do (Healing Doesn’t Happen In A Straight Line)” (2022) shows a figure as he sits shirtless on a sofa, his gaze downcast and his hands gently clasped. In his “Living With a Broken Heart Made It Difficult When I Was Young and Bullet Proof (It’s Easier To Miss You Than It Is To Let You Down)” (2022), Niles shows another inwardly focused figure, seated in a hospital hallway in a wheelchair, his hands over his face. While often self-contained and introspective, Niles’ life-size figures nevertheless directly engage viewers, mirroring their bodies and inviting them into a shared space. The exhibition also examines other, subtler forms of loss. “Always Had Me Under Your Spell (Some Things Ain’t Meant To Stay the Same)” (2022) depicts the park adjacent to the artist’s former Brooklyn apartment, where he would frequently take breaks from painting to watch the setting sun. The work gestures both to the artist’s nostalgic associations with place and to his own experiences of calm and self-reflection in nature. Indeed, in Niles’s work, the natural landscape is also a landscape of memory and feeling. A still life, “I Don’t Keep Liquor Here (I Been Learning How To Do It All the Hard Way)” (2022) , likewise explores connections between self and place. A countertop reveals traces of daily life, featuring objects such as bags of snacks sealed with clips, packages of wipes, a pair of oven mitts, and the work gestures to the artist’s own experiences of sobriety primarily by way of omission. For Niles, still lives can function akin to portraits, suggesting both the presence and absence of a space’s inhabitants and capturing the traces of themselves that they leave behind in their environments. The exhibition also includes new drawings, a medium to which Niles has recently returned. While the artist had not produced drawings outside his sketchbook since college, he revisited the medium over the past year, borrowing from his approaches to painting to reinvigorate his engagement with drawing. Across his drawings, Niles often allows for the surface of the paper to remain partly visible, and the artist strategically uses negative space, allowing room for absence as he endows his subjects with powerful presence.

Photo: Arcmanoro Niles, Growing Up May Be The Hardest Thing I Do (Healing Doesn’t Happen In A Straight Line), 2022, Oil, acrylic, and glitter on canvas, 60 x 90 inches / 152.4 x 228.6 cm, © Arcmanoro Niles, Courteys the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 9/11/2022-7/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/