Nick Irzyk: 41 ELIZABETH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10013

In The Book of Memory, Paul Auster returns to the image of Jonah in the belly of the great fish. This stark image conveys Auster’s own solitude facing the blank page in his studio on Varick Street in 1980. As Auster’s memoir flashes between moments from his past and present, we revisit Jonah, the emblem of willful disobedience and despair. But Jonah’s tale is also one of mercy, and for Auster, it suggests the rewards of sitting alone in a room, the endless connections that reverberate between oneself and the world even in the darkest of times. 

Nick Irzyk’s paintings convey this pulsing sense of solitude and connection, hope and despair. One moment they are blueprints of time, telescoping between memory and life and smudged with footsteps from the past. The next moment they are novels, each tile a word and curve a sentence elaborating an imagined world. These looping coils, buzzing with color and feedback, could be the Tower of Babel or the tales of Scheherazade. With their winding spools and gravelly lines, they depict the connections between the part and the whole, the seen and the unseen, the endless worlds beyond their frame. In Irzyk’s paintings you see canary yellow, madder red, carbon black, burnt umber, grid after grid, and again and again, the faint outlines of the belly of the great fish.