ANDREW SALGADO: NATURE BOY

Andrew Salgado’s newest body of work, Nature Boy, is a collection of originally unrelated paintings that ­ together ­ began to take on a life of their own. The series is titled after Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy, where the narrator recounts meeting a mysterious visitor who tells him about love. Salgado insists that like the so­ called ‘accidental’ paintings ­ the exhibition itself should also feel transient and temporary, therefore the show will open on a Friday and run for three days only. Salgado, who typically plays with spectacle and presentation in his exhibitions, (releasing 500 live butterflies at one previous opening; or installing an artificial beach with 8 metre projection of the ocean in another), promises another such theatrical flourish for this show. The show also features the artist’s first­ ever non­representational paintings.

The large scale, gestural paintings of Andrew Salgado explore concepts relating to the destruction and reconstruction of identity – a process that he views as re­considering the conventions of figurative painting through a pursuit toward abstraction. Salgado questions the nature of identity and even the act of painting itself as something monstrous, allegorical, or symbolic. Incorporating Classical archetypes alongside a wildly inventive approach to his chosen media, Salgado’s work defies categorisation. Recent works include collage, mixed­ media, and even hand­ dyed and hand­ stitched linen and canvas. ”I am interested in how my paintings operate independently from their literal figurative foundation, and how they might deconstruct through colour choices, reduction of forms, and triumph of materiality to become something altogether otherworldly.