Nicolas Tovar

Nicolas Tovar is a mixed media artist who graduated from the prestigious Slade School of Art and SAIC . Having lived in Chicago, London, and New York, his works epitomize an urban sensibility.

Creating works on raw canvas, earthy tones emerge from months of unprecious use, the accumulation of accidental marks and residue from other components in the studio, as well as exhausted images and watercolors that occasionally coalesce to form a singular image among others. Tovar describes these works as sites of physical labor. Taking a non-fetishized approach to the material, the artist prioritizes charging the surface of the work with memory, labor, and moments of chance—marks made beyond his control.

This approach allows him to create work that, much like our fragmented cultural landscape, embodies a collapse of context, where certain floating signifiers appear clearer than others. Similar to the way memories function, there is an intuitive hierarchy in their sequencing. These sites of accumulation and erasure are understood by the artist more as constructions than paintings. In United (Delirium Series), the artist’s own shadow and feet are painted into the work, as if capturing the surface of the painting itself—a surface that also functioned as his ground or floor.

Tovar’s recent projects feature billboards layered with white paint that partially obscures journal-like writing and drawings. These layers are printed over with imagery using industrial printers typically used for storefronts and banners, creating multi-layered surfaces where the obscured elements reveal themselves upon close inspection. His works from London similarly invite the viewer into an automatically recognisable cultural space; that of the city’s electric green Lime bike. These shots through the city, much like human memory, are hazy but familiar and combine inner and outer worlds as a meditative waypoint.

Across these projects, Tovar continues to blur boundaries between construction and image, layering context and meaning within each surface.