The line between the real and unreal is a thin one. Just beyond the horizon, and beyond the corner of our eye, exists only the expanse of our imagination – what you might call magic. And it’s in this liminal space between magic and matter, fact and fiction, that you find “Past Imperfect,” a new exhibition of paintings by Richard Nielsen at Track16.

Nielsen’s works, many of them portraits of masked people or surreal landscapes, tap into the unease of our contemporary moment. I can say with absolute certainty that if you polled people in at the start of the millennium how they thought the country would look in twenty years, no one would have even been close. The images and news stories of today would have been impossible to imagine for many Americans. And by juxtaposing paintings of cryptid monsters and psychedelia with paintings of masked faces and hospice rooms, Nielsen draws out that subtle divide.

One of the most striking paintings that lies completely in this divide is one of a zookeeper, dressed in a loose fitting panda costume, swaddling a cub. The caretaker stands on a flat green background adorned with prints of deciduous leaves, hand-feeding and looking down at the small cub like a doting mother. It’s surreal and bizarre, but it’s based in reality – zookeepers actually dress like that to handle a new cub, so as to acclimate it to other pandas.

But Nielsen does not just deal with the bizarre reality of our present, but ties it also to our tumultuous past. In the painting Antifa Denmark 1945, Danish Freedom Fighters, Great Uncle (2020), we find five well-dressed men, standing in a variegated cobblestone street – members of the Danish resistance, as the title suggests. Nielsen connects this earlier form of anti-fascism – that is, freedom fighters working against Nazi Germany – with the more modern catch-all movement titled Antifa, which has become a bogeyman for ultra-conservative nationalists. In doing so, Nielsen contextualizes the modern Anti-Fascist movement with grass-root anti-fascism throughout history, letting the past meet the present to make sense of our reality.

Track16
1206 Maple Ave., #1005, LA, CA, 90015
Thru May 29th, 2021