An Interview With Vick Naresh

Vick Naresh, Age of Aquarius, 2024. Oil, Oil Stick and Conte on Canvas. 72 X 48 Inches (Diptych).

Composed of a collection of canvases enhanced by the vibrant hues and buoyant silhouettes that are Hamilton-based painter Vick Naresh’s signature, his solo exhibition You Are Many Faces at The Assembly Gallery offers a pleasing mental trip along the light fantastic.

Described by the artist himself as expressions of mindscapes – mental planes that represent new and freewheeling thought processes, the scenes depicted in the show are of a rare breed. It’s the first time Naresh is publicly presenting these particular face-based works; canvases that he works on as diversions from other project-focused pieces.

Crafted to inspire gallery goers to ruminate on life’s limitless potential and the intangible occurrences that bring a sense of depth to the everyday, Naresh “explores memory, nostalgia, and identity through the use of poetic symbolism, drawing from lived experiences and future hopes to travel back and capture the essence of fleeting moments.”

As the show enters its final days, Naresh divulges more about his process and the importance of sharing the personal.

How do the works in your current show fit into your overall practice?

These works are very important to me personally – I make these kinds of pieces between doing my other paintings. If I’m making a series for an exhibition, for example, I kind of go somewhere completely crazy and then it's hard to find my way back into my space, and to my grounding of what I want to do in my practice. These are pieces I make to come back to reality and place myself in my practice. And if I'm stuck with one of my paintings for a show, I’ll go on to make pieces with these faces, because I find faces are a way to connect. Somehow, they give a response, and I can calibrate my ideas to that response. I’m also able to experiment when I’m making these works.

Tell me more about that experimentation.

I feel grateful to have the time and space to do it, first of all. Typically with my paintings, as you come closer to them and spend more time with them, they start revealing more information to you.  I like that aspect of my work, but it takes a lot of time for me to create those layers of ideas that fit together.  

In the series The Four Winds, which is part of this exhibition, I took it upon myself to create four paintings in a month, which is not my usual speed of making work. I tried to make four paintings that have the same kind of idea, style, and intent but through a slimmed down version of my process. I pared it down to the fewest required steps to create a piece of work that is still my style.

The works in this series were done together in the month of December 2024. I had about 20 days to work with the four blank canvases; spaces to create pieces in that each had its own voice. I took the notion of four winds – each going in a different direction – and I added an element of abstraction that’s more prevalent in the in these paintings. Usually, my abstractions are contained within my forms and shapes. But in these paintings, I created a section of the painting itself as an abstract to emphasize a feeling of freedom, like the wind and its sense of openness.

Vick Naresh, The Four Winds Bar III, 2024. Acrylic & Conte on canvas. 36 X 24 inches.

I noticed that a few works in the show have mystical and enigmatic names and themes. Let’s talk a bit about Age of Aquarius, and how that piece came about. Did you always see it as a diptych?

I did, yeah. I began this piece exactly around this time last year and it was my first painting of 2024. I like to start my biggest idea first, and as time progresses, I'll make other pieces.

In terms of the inspiration, I grew up in a very religious and strict environment; I've changed my calibration in thinking as I've gotten older, obviously, but some of the things that have stuck with me from that time are about seeing the world in a different way, and seeing the forces of what is not present physically around us. The things beyond our comprehension that that we must give respect to.

Age of Aquarius is one of those paintings that I thought about while I was researching how humanity is moving forward in time. It makes you think about how far we might get with this whole current system of ours. This painting is a response to that, where I'm talking about the Age of Aquarius coming in, which is the age of working in collaboration as opposed to an ‘I’ mentality. It’s the age where the human spirit moves into a place where we work together as opposed to working for ourselves.

It's a painting about fluidity, which has the overarching quality of Aquarius, which is characterized by water and love. That’s why I chose the colours teal, turquoise and red to have prominent placement. This work is also about the passing of the Age of Pisces, and if you look at the painting closely, you'll see fish in different parts of it.

Vick Naresh, Not one to Collide (ASTRAL), 2024. Oil, oil Stick & Conte on Canvas. 40 X 36 Inches.

Since you brought up colours, and I myself am a colour enthusiast, tell me more about how you select your palettes and the graphic shapes we see in your paintings.

I grew up in Mumbai, surrounded by Bollywood art. Back in the 1980s, Bollywood films would be promoted by these massive posters with hand-made graphics. They were like giant, marvelous paintings that had what I thought were very avant-garde colour combinations that were impressed upon my brain. And since I was a child, I’ve also loved to paint. 

In making a painting, I always start off very surely. I have a canvas I’ll splash paint around on, and I'll see forms starting to show in the paint and I'll begin to draw them out. I don't start with a sketch, I just go on the canvas and start ‘drawing’. I actually record this process so I can see myself doing it, because I don't always believe what I’ve done after the fact! 

Once that initial drawing is done, I start painting on the canvas; I'll maybe do a couple of digital mock-ups, too, if needed, but usually I have a clear idea. Sometimes I don't work on the painting, I simply sit there with it. I’ll look at it in the morning and then go on to something else. Eventually, like Francis Bacon said, it just jumps at you – that it is not the painting that you want. This is not what you want to say. So, you start adding subtracting elements and finding correlation to your present circumstance and your present thought process and putting that into the painting. Sometimes when I’m reading to my kids, an idea will jump out at me and then I return to the painting to find a way to incorporate it, or translate it into the work.

Now that you’ve spent some time in the gallery hearing what people are saying about these pieces, what has the feedback been since this is the first time you’re formally showing these ‘mindscape’ works?

These works have almost a visceral response from people, because they connect with the form of the head, and the idea of a headspace. I wanted the gallery to feel like when you walk in, that you’re surrounded by the extent of what our brains can think. I felt inspired by how vast that exploration can be.

This experience was a bit more nerve wracking than my other shows, because I’m presenting a very personal series of work. But the reactions have been phenomenal. It’s stressful, but it's also rewarding for me when I meet people who see my paintings. And my biggest reward is hearing that they understand that in life, there's a journey involved. There is a path to take, and it's a path that you can decide for yourself based on your calibration, your experiences, your love, your joy, and your situation.

Vick Naresh’s You Are Many Faces is on until Tuesday, January 28th at The Assembly Gallery in Hamilton.