Nikolas Soren Goodich's Art Communicates a Unity of Esoteric and Quotidian Concepts

Nikolas Soren Goodich, Luminous Mysteries Human Symmetries MMFA Public Art Installation 2024, photo by the artist

By WM Staff December 10, 2024

Nikolas Soren Goodich has been showing internationally for many years. Goodich's work has been written about by leading critics and exhibited at top museums. He's a dedicated artist, with a symphonic imagination and an art practice that includes painting and even architecture. Whitehot had an interesting conversation with Goodich who joins us for the following interview...
 

You strike us as a larger-than-life personality in the tradition of people like Julian Schnabel and other artists from history. How do you feel your personality comes through (if at all) in your work?

You’re right, I do have larger-than-life, dreams, ideas, plans. There is ambitious, monumental scale-ness to my vision; Fitzcaraldian, quixotic. But there are also deeply humble aspects as well. I make work that is, in the same instant, bold, vibrant, intense while also being calming, meditative, serene. This paradox is who I am, and the confrontation with and recognition of the paramount existence of the nature of paradox itself is central to who I am and my work. So, yes, my personality infuses the works on many levels. I am an autodidact synthesizing disparate intellectual frames of reference, contexts and domains with the intention to examine and communicate a unity of both esoteric and quotidian concepts. This comes through in my studio and public art practices. It’s found in the many varied permutations of my multilayered glass painting practice; plexiglass diptychs on canvas or wood panel, back lit plexiglass on LED panels, edge-lit plexiglass on canvas, two-sided edge-lit luminous works on pedestals that re for interior or exterior installation, public art, architecture. Within the works are complexities, divergent but clearly related recursive levels of meaning, isomorphisms abound in formal terms and in terms of meanings, content.

My big, big most ambitious dream is for The Luminous Community Center (LCC) a proposal for a socially engaged public artwork that is an architectural installation, a whole building 20 ft tall and 40 ft x 40 ft, a 1600 sq ft space, made from my two-sided edge-lit multi layered kiln fired glass and plexiglass paintings. A work of luminous glass public art that is also architecture that is also a placemaking event space for communities and individual contemplation. People will see themselves portrayed in its monumental scale abstracted profile portraits, and they will see others there too, surrounded by light, color, transparency, reflection, refraction, echo, abstraction, the outside world and the interior of the LCC combining a visual liminal reverb and delay.

Nikolas Soren Goodich, Luminous Community Center, Day - CG Renderings @ lumiouscommunitycenter.org
 

Luminous Community Center, Night - CG Renderings @ lumiouscommunitycenter.org
 

These ideas, plans, and works indicate an occult sensibility, challenging, altering the borders of established domains of meaning, stretching trusted linguistic terms to their breaking point to establish new forms, new ideas, new interpretations, new ways art and public art can function. This is what I aim for and where I find myself, literal and metaphorical, subjectively and objectively.   

Color seems important to you as an expressive tool. Often you use bright yellow and seem to create paintings that are planned out yet executed with speed. How do you balance ideas with spontaneity in your process?

I love yellow. I love color. Color is an essential element in my work. One of the paradoxes I suggest we confront is that color does not really exist. It is a subjective cultural artifact, personally and socially inscribed upon our perceptions, awareness. This is a physical physiological fact on all levels that matter. So I hope to use color to connect with peoples inner worlds in a more direct manner, as a psychological mechanism. I hope to push viewers visceral interaction, their relations to the work, to extremes, to break through inherent apathy, alienation, reliance on aesthetic cliché in fine art and in popular forms of creativity as well. Isn’t this some of what the Fauves and Neue Wilden were up to? I aim to tap into that psychic energy, that seeking of freedom, that exuberant grappling with life and light we all share.

Every visual painted element in my work is hand mono printed on one or both sides of panels of kiln fired glass or plexiglass. These panels are layered together. The multiple layers are individual prints that become puzzles, networks, structures, organic abstractions building into paintings, that are a sort of virtual luminous sculpture, that can become a form of public art and that can become art as architecture. Colors are transparent, translucent, or semi-opaque. Subtle tones and differing hues and qualities of matte or gloss surfaces combine with my use of light itself as a medium. Light – ambient or LED - is transmitted, flowing, absorbed  throughout the paint on the multiple layers of plexiglass or kiln fired glass, transforming the common experience of flattened color into a kaleidoscope, a harmony, a holographic aura, an efflorescence.

For five years I have been working on a large body of work divided into two series, Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries. The process is, as you seem to intuit, both highly spontaneous and planned down to nearly every detail at the very same time. I have a short list of rules I use that fit my media and intentions. My hand mono printing techniques allow for an unintentional, fractal, arterial abstraction to exist, to be immersed within, to sit alongside strict, geometrical, structured compositions. This is how I achieve the goal of creating work in which its elements are obfuscated and exposed and in a precarious balance, symmetry and asymmetry working hand in hand; paradoxes concealed and revealed.

Are you interested in certain aspects of art history? Or are you less involved with looking back for inspiration?

I am a dedicated student of art history, of art and history. From Lascaux to Giotto to Dubuffet to those in the near infinite contemporary art world, verdant, excessive, ever present, a nonfinite overflowing fountain of museums and galleries showing works, new and old, that the internet and social media allows us to view, at least virtually, in a literally never-ending stream of visual presentations, and which art fairs reflect in their near infinite abundance as well. Ideas. Artworks. Artists. The place of both in our culture. I look back, I see the now, I imagine the future. I am as equally curious about and inspired by the details of a broad range of schools, modes, and historical milieus, artists lives and ideas, as I am by artworks.

Nikolas Soren Goodich, Museum of Art and History, Solo Show 2024, Photo by Joshua White

Some of your paintings show faces staring at each other. What is this about?

The central visual element in my work is a symbolic form that we all see as profile portraits of nonexistent people. Sometimes they look at themselves, and sometimes they are looking away from themselves, sometimes the profile portraits are superimposed over one another, other times they seem to be kissing, or have their faces thrust up against another. Symmetries and asymmetries.

Mirrors, mirroring, reflection, echo, the idea of the projection of one’s self-image, how others see us, how we think they see us, what light enables us to apprehend, defining self and other, our idea of self as defined by the face; these are elements in sets of interrelated narratives concerning neurology, consciousness studies, epistemology, will, free or otherwise, unconsciousness and subconsciousness, how any knowledge of self is or is not established and invested with meaning through portraiture, portraits, our face, faces, the ever changing elements that make up our visage.

Nikolas Soren Goodich, Museum of Art and History, Solo Show 2024, Photo by Joshua White
 

The profile portraits posit existential questions. Who am I? How do I know myself? How do I know others? Is there a me versus a you? I see in them Janus, the ancient Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways,^[2] passages, frames, and endings. Every one of the terms in this list echoes the literal and metaphorical meanings related here. How do we know ourselves? How do we actually construct the changing versions of ourselves? We can choose to change from a state of unconsciousness to awareness. This is healing. This is revelation of self, in deeper and truer ways. Who are we as a species? How do we change as a species?

Compositional ideas of figure/ground and portraiture, core to the history of art, are presented simultaneously as figuration, symbolism, abstraction, and as a visual language presenting and interconnecting signifiers of physics, neurology, cognition, the creation of meaning, the apprehension of reality itself, starting with our faces, our bodies, our perceptions of self and of other. 

Museum of Art and History, Solo Show 2024, Photo by Joshua White
 

Is your work, like many artists' works, autobiographical exploration? Do you agree with the idea that artists are always making self-portraits even when not doing work about themselves?

On both specific and purely general levels, every artists work can be said to be or contain elements of self-portraiture. That idea refers to narratives in the works themselves echoing aspects of the artists personal life, or simply to the fact that in making art we create ourselves, our larger self that contains all we do, say, make, and experience. Where does the self end and the rest of the universe begin? There are only stages of difference and more or less vague border lines. 

In my work one could say the profile portraits are all “me,” but they are all you, too. When I create these profile portraits, they are not me, they are not you, they are not anyone, but they are anyone, everyone, you, me. They are a symbolic linguistic signifier that viewers project ideas of self onto.

Museum of Art and History, Solo Show 2024, Photo by Joshua White

Tell us about your art education?

My parents first took me to museums and galleries in LA and NYC at a very young age. They surrounded me with books on artists and art. I was already making art obsessively at three or four years old. I started taking art classes at seven. By the time I graduated high school I had already done summer sessions at Cal Arts, Art Center, Otis Parsons, and RISD. I then went to RISD for two years. I left and went to The Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts for a year. A decade later I had one semester at The Art Institute of Chicago. Then twenty years later I went to Virginia Commonwealth Universities School of the Arts and got my BFA in Painting and Printmaking. I graduated in 2019, moved to San Francisco, and began the body of work I am currently exhibiting and continuing work on.  

You've had a lot of exhibitions. What do you think makes the installation of a show better than an ordinary approach to curating shows? 

The installation of shows, group or solo, is a natural step for me from creating work in the studio. In the studio I sit with works, finished and unfinished, and I imagine them in spaces, being presented as individual statements and within the larger framework of other works. In the last five years I have been lucky to be able to use the skills I have gained from being a freelance preparator and art handler for twenty-seven years to making installations of my own work that I feel reach museum level. This enables viewers to view the work in ways that let them, the works, communicate their meanings in the best way possible. This translates into how the works then activate collectors homes, collectors lives.  

Is there literature, music or visual art that has inspired your work?

The list would be way too long to write out! I have been obsessively, daily, reading books and listening to music, and digging deep into the visual art and artifacts of our past and everchanging present my whole life. There is never enough time. I can pick out just a few visual artists whose work has directly affected my practice, my aesthetic and conceptual modes; the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet, the printmaking and painting of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the neo-expressionism of Horst Antes, RB Kitaj, Francis Bacon, and others. In my youth I read Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Hesse, Jung, Cambell, Freud, Burroughs, Tom Wolfe, Tom Robbins, Shakespeare, Pynchon, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, Isabel Allende, Marquez, and countless other authors writing literature, history, on art, physics, neurology, critical theory, etc, inspiring me to create art that contained some similar density of meaning. I am a musician and a writer, as well - working on a novel right now - so the list of music I adore and am inspired by would also be a very long one indeed, with the artists, albums, and songs  coming from almost all western genres and historical periods.

Museum of Art and History, Solo Show 2024, Photo by Joshua White
 

What advice would you give to young artists?

Make art that moves you. Don’t settle for less than that. If a work you make doesn’t do that, make more until they do. Make art for yourself. Make art in ways that are not the same as everyone else. Find meaning and purpose and content in the work that reflects who you are, who you have been and who you are becoming, and who we are, who we have been and who we are becoming, who we should be and become. Make work that speaks to yourself and to other people in ways that are meaningful first to you, for then others will connect and find meaning in them as well. Draw, paint, print, use assemblage, digital, analog, traditional techniques, techniques no one has ever used before, use materials no one has ever used or combined, discover, reveal, invent. Making art requires an absolute focus and dedication to form and content. Find that form and content, true to who you are and to your ideas of the world. Then make hundreds and hundreds of works or make three that are the best you can possibly make. Don’t stop. Invest everything you have in you in it. This process, this practice, will give back to you, in infinite private personal ways, and potentially in public ways as well. But art is for yourself first and for others if the world, other people, want it second. If they do not seem to want it, do not let that stop you. You are the art you make. Be art.

10.  What's coming up for you next?

I don’t know. I just deinstalled my first solo museum exhibition that was up for two months at The Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA. My hope is that another museum will ask to have the show travel in 2026 or 2027!

I have a few shows in LA next year. One in which I will be making multi-layered prints combining digital output on paper and mylar with my hand mono printed plexiglass panels. Another show was to be at Bergamot Station during Frieze LA, but the gallery was forced to move due to the city of Santa Monica’s plans to build new housing. The show was going to present aspects of my proposed The Luminous Community Center (LCC) in different ways; an immersive 12 projector video projection of the interior of the building, including its walls, ceiling, and the way light would refract and move across the floor as the sun moves through the sky and its light is cast down through the glass walls and ceiling of the luminous glass building. The show would also have had examples of my luminous glass work, showing the form and techniques that will be the LCC itself, and there was to be a luminous maquette of the LCC placed in a green space as well. The show is on hold until the gallery finds a new space, which may be in LA or in Mexico City or Madrid.

In Fall 2025 my two largest luminous two-sided edge-lit plexiglass works, Kindred Spirit Serenity Memoir and Entheogenic Transubstantiation, each 6 ft x 6ft, will be installed for six months in the main lobby of The Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA. This is really a big deal for me. When I was homeless a decade ago, living on the streets of LA, struggling with the addiction that is what put me into that nightmare time in my life, I would sit on the steps of the Pacific Design Center and envision just such an installation. At over a decade clean and sober now, it is literally a dream coming true. WM