7.2

HAND OVER FIST

Luca Nicholas
Luca Nicholas
13.02.25–15.03.25
Without the hand, there is no artefact, nothing to sell, nothing to archive. Without the hand, there is no flourish, no flex, and no fist.
Season is delighted to present Hand Over Fist, an exhibition of prints made by Luca Nicholas during his 2024 residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. The works focus on the Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten, developing out of the artist’s interest in the secondary market for men’s fashion, and particularly ‘archival fashion’: high-level thrifting that operates at the intersection of capital, culture, and scarcity. Archivists seek the ‘grail’, an article of clothing ascribed significant cultural and monetary value. Nicholas notes: ‘Exclusivity in this field breeds an aura of elitism; the girls that get it, get it: iykyk. As archival fashion becomes increasingly more mainstream, via platforms like Grailed, I’m excited by the possibilities that virtual and real archives offer in preserving significant artefacts and promoting circular fashion models. However, the field has not escaped the same crises of consumption and inflation that surround the fashion industry as a whole. In its more base iterations, I fear that archival fashion is little more than an insidious flex of power and privilege.’

While in Belgium, Nicholas began to think about the complexities of archives of different kinds, including collections of valuables and databases of images. Such archives are often limited, screening out that which is deemed marginal. Entities within them are subject to degradation and distortion, physical and digital. Turning to the patchy archive of Vogue Runway, Nicholas selected photographs of Van Noten taken during runway shows. He drew and painted on silkscreen mesh using watercolour crayons and pencils and graphite, then pulled monotypes, consciously eschewing the print’s typical status as a multiple and creating a sort of uber-grail. Unlike conventional silkscreen prints, which are characterised by crisp contours, layered planes of colour, and a sense of control, Nicholas’s works are marked by glitchy smears and unpredictable textures. Richly gestural and palpably spontaneous, they draw attention to the hand of the artist. The images themselves focus on the hands of Van Noten, which appear by turns elegant and meaty, expressive and lifeless. Nicholas calls to mind diverse connotations of the hand—the hand of the master, for instance, the many hands through which an item might pass—and reminds us of the primacy of the hand in traditional printmaking and garment-making alike.
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