David NIcholson 1970, Montréal. Lives and works in New York The first is the eye that sees. The second is the object seen. The third is the distance between the two. The instinct for imitation is inherent in human beings from our earliest days. Also inborn in all of us is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation, for we enjoy looking at the most accurate representations of things. The first thing I notice in a creative act is the encounter. The paint, the canvas, and all other materials are a secondary part of this encounter. They are the language of the encounter. The essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world. Imagination in art consists of knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing thing, but never of inventing or creating the thing itself. That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. The dilemma — intuition vs. tuition — how to reconcile the one with the other without patronizing either. One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone to whom he can be a midwife: thus originates a good conversation. We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive. Presently there may be coming God knows what horrors — horrors of which, in this sheltered island, we have not even a “Traditional Knowledge”. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house — the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. — David Nicholson Selected group exhibitions: 2003: Moving Energies #01, Folkwang Museum, Essen; Project Space, Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels; After Picasso/Matisse, P.S.1, New York; City Mouse/Country Mouse, Space 101, New York; Labour Day, Rare, New York; 2002: Painting as Paradox, Aritists Space, New York; Riva, New York.	Alex Arcadia, 2000. Oil on canvas, 112 x 203 cm. Courtesy Aeroplastics, Brussels.