Nicholas Papadakis

Nicholas Papadakis is a Red Hook, Brooklyn-based artist and designer. Nicholas’s primary passion is in the never-ending pursuit of experimental, process-oriented paintings. He has developed a unique painting style that exposes the fractal qualities of rare, powdered pigments through which he explores the language of Nature’s physical and organic properties. His current artworks explore concepts of extinction, regeneration, and sustainability of the human experience. Nicholas received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design where he pursued an inter-disciplinary fine arts education. His artworks have been exhibited in galleries, museums, and site-specific locations internationally.

A selection of artworks that expose the fractal qualities of raw, powdered pigments; explore the language of Earth's physical and organic properties; express the elegant, self-organizing principles of nature and examine human constructs of extinction, regeneration and sustainability. Discovering a flaw and elaborating upon it - pushing it to extremes - in the search of hidden beauty. The infinite fractal patterns created through my artworks are considered by pigment manufacturers to be flaws and failures of product. Yet when allowed to express themselves fully, become instead, an unadulterated language of physical and elemental properties of the Earth, exposing the self-organizing principles of nature. This technique, and the organic patterns that it creates, lend themselves to an almost infinite exploration of the natural world across macro- and microcosmic scales. "Potentialities" is an ongoing Lens-based sculpture series documented by site-specific photographs. Each transparent artwork conceptualizes an aspect of the ephemeral nature of human experience. I patiently study the play of light and color refracting through the clear objects; I am in search of a transformative moment to photograph - one in which the tangible sculptures are rendered insubstantial and hallucinatory - one in which I can imagine the subject's past, present, and future - from the 'a-ha' moment of inception to it's faded memory.