Jonny Niesche

Jonny Niesche’s Atoms Encode sees the Sydney-based artist push his unique painting practice even further, literally stretching it to create a work that holistically “skins” the entire rear wall of the gallery. An immense painterly gesture that will take over the back gallery of 1301SW, while the lengthy front space features a row of diamonds.

Presenting a group of four large-scale works of multi-layered voile set in polished brass, this group of diamonds are created in vibrant colours merging and morphing into one another within each picture, a combination that reveals the familiar Nieschian effects of shimmer and moiré. This prismatic grotto is extended with a corner work representing a complex architecture of light, its angles reference the Donald Judd stack while firmly situated in a Euro discothèque, projections of softened pantone tones stagger between reflecting gold mirrors.

In the gallery’s viewing room, a trio of lightboxes broadcast their energy analogously to the paintings in voile, even coupled with the reflective frame, yet these are but another example of how Niesche’s precise practice allows for a great deal of diversion. These lightboxes, a new venture, perhaps also talk to the show’s title, Atoms Encode, in the most literal way: “Atoms are not just matter, they also continuously transmit, encode and store information: the medium of such a pancomputationalism (the idea that everything computes) would be light.”