Nick Angelo

Nick Angelo is best-known as a painter who occasionally makes models. Perhaps though, he is a model-maker who also paints – the early paintings are folkishly diagrammatic circulatory systems: luxury-or-modest-home-to-anonymous-pharmaceutical-company-to-burnt-out-room-todrug-treatment-to-luxury-or-modest-home, repeating endlessly...

In Angelo’s models, the Marxist geographers’ Spatial Fix – the investment of capital directly in land or a sector of real estate: be it penthouse, needle exchange, dingy apartment, or workout room – is pried from its conventional arrangement and set down, à la Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, in uncomfortable proximity to opposing sectors. By eliding the distance between social spaces and unceremoniously prying them open to view, Angelo reveals a dirty secret: it is all one system – the externalities of the luxury suite materialize in the addict’s den, the tastefully appointed non-profit is enmeshed with the woes it seeks to address – contradictions, once set in motion, are inextricably linked…

Amidst all the questioning, there is an element of glee in Nick Angelo’s models. We sense that he takes as much pleasure in destroying objects and spatial conventions as he does in constructing pristine simulations and there is as much (more?) care given to the necroscapes, the wasteoid spaces, as to the luxury spas. This leads to another uncomfortable realization: the boardrooms, the penthouse suites…?...hopelessly banal beside the smashed and frayed remnants of the social…”

—Scott Benzel, excerpt from The Cremation of Care