“In technical terms, Nicole Landau is, and has always been, a photographer. The camera is her instrument of choice and the photographic print her optical field. Landau’s vision, however, is expansive, sensuous, and rooted in structure and rhythm rather than in image, distancing her from the traditional – and indeed mechanical – motivations of photography. While her works value and depend on visual qualities she finds in the “real world” – surface textures, common objects, recessional spaces – they do not turn these qualities into subjects. Rather than amplify such elements, her artworks dissolve their particularities into abstractions, and it is this visual essence that provides the building blocks for her various series.” Excerpt from Nicole Landau : Photography as Painting – An Essay by Art Critic, Peter Frank
NICOLE LANDAU – ARTIST STATEMENT
In the midst of all our miseries, art lets us see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious. — David Hockney
I always start with photographs of aged architectural elements. The original photographs may be used whole, repeated or deconstructed, blended one upon another, forms ultimately emerging through translucency, imparting depth and light. Its inherent patterns revealed, a common object is transformed into previously unimagined landscapes.
My Portals series began with a dream I had in which I drew a circle in the sky with my finger and the stars aligned around it. I kept doing it over and over in disbelief as the stars continued to jump into place. Although this was only a dream, I believe it says something about our primal connection with the circles we see all around us: our sun, the full moon, the constellations arcing overhead, cycles of birth, life, regeneration…the certainty of completion when a circle has closed. This is why I continually explore the circular form in the Portals series. These ”portals” seem doorways to realms of resonance both ancient and new, unexplored and intimately familiar.
My newest series, Temples of Time, plays with the visual harmony inherent in the Tripartite Schema found throughout history in art, religion, and classical architecture. In the most basic way, each piece in the series has three vertical sections and three horizontal, with a third axis of depth implied through layering, creating a coherent nested relationship between parts and the whole. The Three: Body, Soul and Spirit, expressed through sacred geometry. I see this series at once as a ray of light breaking over high mountains and as a perspectival view deep into the mountain range. The art presents as grey, but upon closer inspection it is clearly, if subtly, infused with color. The Temples of Time works provide a place of peace and reflection – a Temple, a primordial echo through the mountains of creation, a place where the threads of life collide and interweave. For all this, the Temples of Time derive their imagery from photographs I take of gates that line back alleys or auto body shops. I thus realize an unlikely transformation by turning what goes unnoticed, discarded, or considered unsightly into a transcendent space.
Nicole Landau is a contemporary fine art photographer from Los Angeles. Nicole holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her art is included in numerous private residential, corporate and hospitality collections worldwide.
Abbreviated Client List:
Kindler Hotel, 58-piece commission for lobby and hotel rooms, Lincoln, NE.
Hyatt Hacienda Hotel, 78-piece, hotel room commission Kikita Beach, Puerto Rico.
ONE Summerlin Building, The Howard Hughes Corporation, 9-piece commercial building commission, Summerlin (Las Vegas), NV.
Hard Rock Hotel, High Limit Lounge, Tampa, FL.
East Hotel, 4-piece common space lobby commission, Miami, Florida.
Mayora Corporation Executive Offices, 8-piece commission Jakarta, Indonesia.
Raffles Hotel, Istanbul - Penthouse Suites.
The Park, Taiwan, 2 separate commissions: HBA Associates and KNA Design.
The Jon Cryer Collection, 8-piece commission, Los Angeles Residence.
LeAnn Rimes Residence, interior design by Jonathan Pierce on VHI Remodel.
Merrill Lynch, Beverly Hills, CA.
Scott Credit Union, St. Louis, MO.
Oaktree Capital, Beverly Hills, CA.
Westin Hotel, Lobby commission, Houston, TX.
Oasis Cruise Ships, Royal Caribbean International, VIP Lounge.
Endeavor Crystal Cruises.
The Howard Hughes Corporation Executive Offices in Houston, TX.
SELECT EXHIBITS AND PUBLICATIONS
2020 – Art Up! Art Fair, Lille, France. Louis Dimension Gallery, France.
2019 – Lines of Sight – Group Show – Curated by Bonny Taylor. Hollywood, CA.
2017 - Nicole Landau: Photography as Painting by Peter Frank, Los Angeles Art Critic.
2017 – Present - Holly Hunt Los Angeles, West Hollywood, CA.
2017 - Art in Design - Panel Discussion WestEdge Design Fair 2017, moderated by Erica Heet, Editor of Interiors Magazine, Panelists: Nicole Landau, Artist; Gulla Jonsdottir, City of West Hollywood Art Chair and Design Director; Maria Cicconi, Graye; and Wendy Posner, Posner Fine Art.
2017- Intimate Strangers - A Los Angeles Conversation. Group show curated by Gulla Jonsdottir, City of West Hollywood Art Chair and Design Director exhibiting in Salone del Mobile Italy and encore show in Los Angeles.
2014 - Art Basel - 3154 Collective, Exhibit Curated by Baron Laurent de Posson de Wanfercee.
2014 - The Icon Gallery, Solo Show.
2014 - Inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s $10M Apartment, Page Six NY Post, May 5, 2014.
2008 – SCAPE – Southern CA Art Projects and Exhibitions Gallery - Group Show. Newport Beach, CA.
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Nicole Landau : Photography as Painting
By Peter Frank
In technical terms, Nicole Landau is, and has always been, a photographer. The camera is her instrument of choice and the photographic print her optical field. Landau’s vision, however, is expansive, sensuous, and rooted in structure and rhythm rather than in image, distancing her from the traditional – and indeed mechanical – motivations of photography. While her works value and depend on visual qualities she finds in the “real world” – surface textures, common objects, recessional spaces – they do not turn these qualities into subjects. Rather than amplify such elements, her artworks dissolve their particularities into abstractions, and it is this visual essence that provides the building blocks for her various series. In other words, Nicole Landau thinks like, works like, and regards the world like a painter – a painter with the lens.
Landau’s claim to the condition of painting would seem to reside most evidently in her frequent employment of large, even mural-size scale. But it is not her resort to that scale per se, but her ability to fill it – indeed, to need to work in those dimensions – that ties Landau to the aesthetics of painting. She works at sizes larger than human not simply because she can, but because her compositions demand it. Attractive enough at a standard scale (with the smallest operating like sketches rather than as miniaturizations), Landau’s compositions reach their full potential, part non-objective energy, part architectural monumentality, when filling the space of abstract expressionism.
That space, the beautiful and terrible void posited by postwar American artists, needs to be described in terms that allow us to enter it even as it maintains its indifference to us. And Landau, using photographic means, provides that description. She oscillates deftly between crisp outline and blurred mid-distance, even within structures that present no depth whatsoever, so as to evoke painterly texture behind or even at the mega-photographs’ glossy surface. Color, too, becomes a tool for the rendition of form and rhythm. In her latest series, the Temples of Time, for instance, the myriad metallic slats (abstracted by Landau from a worn auto-body shop gate) that comprise the seemingly kinetic sheets of dark and light are subtly tinged with a spectral variety of colors, amplifying their delicate and fugitive presence and enhancing their seeming kinesis. What could have been a stark, high-contrast capture of light and shadow has been turned instead into a contemplation of the passage of time. Those embedded colors help Landau convince us we are watching a day unfold.
Landau employs color more overtly – and, if anything, in a yet more painterly way – in series such as the Portals and the related New City. Color sets overall tonality, providing a ground for the highly active figures to interact. Here, she emphasizes presence over span, relying on a particular device, an orbital form (originally derived from weathered doorknobs) floated in a shallow space just behind the picture plane, to constitute the heart of her imagery. The New City pictures show the device beginning to clarify itself behind and among equally assertive irregular rectangular forms; the Portals, by contrast, are built more or less entirely of, and on, that device.
Nicole Landau is not a painter, of course, she is a genuine photographer. She talks excitedly about going out to the city streets looking for real-life textures and tones she can capture with the camera, just as If she were Harry Callahan or Aaron Siskind. Like those masters, however, Landau’s art transcends the mechanics and the traditions of photography even while acknowledging them. Painting is the discipline from which Callahan and Siskind took their readiest cues, and, similarly, painting is the art Landau conjures most directly in her photography.
PETER FRANK is Associate Editor for Fabrik magazine and Contributing Editor for art ltd. He is former critic for Angeleno magazine and the L. A. Weekly. He has served as editor for THEmagazine Los Angeles and Visions Art Quarterly, as well as Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum. Frank studied art history at Columbia University in his native New York, where he wrote for The Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News.