Nicolas Roggy

“Nicolas Roggy’s paintings are not representations but rather constructions, ones that are at once material and visual and which seem to take up position and disassemble themselves in a self-same gesture. These paintings on aluminium feature an accumulation of lines that contain volumes which rear up like screens: each work takes shape through layering, additions, removals, sanding, grids, overpainting, and scratches. Each work evokes the logic of a film set: different elements of décor serve as surfaces which, rather than affirming the existence of the things that they stand in for or imitate, instead define a visual space constructed from discordant elements. Patterns here double, support and recompose one another, without looking to blend together. The surface becomes a site for a reflection on the medium of painting itself and hence on its own visibility, a site where structures take shape and resist immediate interpretation, where intense yet blurred images refuse obstinately to resolve themselves into a single form. Without exception, the paintings are dotted with signs, littered with incidents.

It all begins with preparatory drawings, which not only precede his painting but determine its conditions. The graphic framework they establish sets the scale of the complex forms of Roggy’s paintings. It is in this in-between, in this shift from blueprint to matter, that a kind of psychedelia emerges, not as a motif but as an effect of vertigo. Roggy talks about “setting traps”: a moment in which the elements which establish the form and the presence of the canvas, everything that will appear in its “façade”, risk turning back on their author. This vertigo becomes the very matter of his paintings, which replay it endlessly. We might describe them as “paranoid surfaces” caught up in their own effects.

During a conversation, Roggy and I discussed Brian De Palma and the way his characters are constantly trapped by the devices of cinema (Obsession, Mission:Impossible) and assailed by effects of voyeurism, doubles, and split screens (Sisters, Hi, Mom!, Carrie). In Body Double (1984), the landscape against which the film’s title is set in the opening sequence is quickly revealed to be little more than a film set backdrop when it is whisked away by prop assistants. This doubling of one image within another foreshadows the mise-en-abyme to come in the film, where false artifices are as numerous as the images themselves. Throughout the film, the protagonist plays an actor, and yet finds himself trapped between this role and that of the spectator, caught up in the manipulation of the cinematic medium.

Roggy’s painting contains its own inversions and twists, or at least its own cuts. Perhaps this is why we ended up talking about cinema rather than painting (or why I am intentionally omitting that part of our discussion here). In the work of experimental filmmaker, painter and graphic designer Paul Sharits, the image is fragmented in deeply material sequences of colour that are divided into brief temporal units and atomised by cuts. These cuts serve as a continuous narrative for the intensity of affects and bring about a destabilisation of perception. The more I look at Roggy’s paintings, the more I realise that my gaze is captured by a discontinuous pictorial montage, where the eye circulates and stumbles over successive images, each of which is full of interference.

In the paintings that make up the exhibition “Facings”– a title that my autocorrect, in another kind of interference, obstinately renders as “Fadings” – this confusion is made tangible. After all, “facings” refers generally to the linings of clothing designed to strengthen their interior seams. However, in the context of an exhibition, this term could also refer to the layout and orientation of the works, the relationship between them and their relationship to the surrounding space. In the formats Roggy has chosen for this exhibition, which are more restrained than those of his past series, painting is necessarily more contained, and acts as a kind of suspended tool, its surfaces as psychic as they are retinal.

Somewhat paradoxically, he states that his larger paintings seem to be more “related to the subject”; with these smaller formats, by contrast, he is attempting to “lose sight of the figurative, to lose the subject”. They start out from the consistence of a given object, to which gestures are applied and repeated to form a sequence. Roggy explains that he approaches certain works as if he were “putting together a piece of furniture”. Everything depends, then, on the systems that he uses to make his works; what matters is the visual effect, as it is constructed mentally.

Roggy chooses to operate within these systems that can trap him, that he can fall into, allowing his paintings to take shape mid-descent, with one image flipping into another and displacing its subject. Losing the subject indeed means rendering painting paranoid, pushing it to a form of psychosis, a state of anarchy, a “reduced special effect” that is tempered by the presence of another that contradicts or doubles it. On the surface, on the double screen, between two states – image and structure, optical effect and tangible material – what Roggy constructs is something like a paranoid space, one conscious of its own fabrication and gripped by its own vertigo.

Fiona Vilmer, October 2025