RICHARD NONAS: No-Water-In, P420, 2011

The exhibition is titled No Water-In*. It includes drawings and floor and wall sculptures made in steel and wood. Some work was made in the 1970’s and some were made for this exhibition. There is also a selection of artist’s books made by Nonas during fourty years.
The opening of the exhibition will be on May 21 and the artist will be present.
*NO-WATER-IN, says Nonas, “is a snapshot. It is a snapshot of the gaps between my ideas and
the things I make because of them. It is a snapshot of the cut between knowing and
being. -It is my attempt to jump the widening gaps between the world and the
works I make to skew it. It is a snapshot of crossings attempted; spans holding and
collapsing. It is a snapshot of repetitive failure; of ropes thrown but not necessarily
caught. It is a snapshot of how bridges fail and why they are rebuilt to fail again.”
Richard Nonas was trained not as an artist but as an anthropologist.
“Dreams change”, he has written, “I am no longer an anthropologist. That surprises me; an important part of my life has gone without my realizing it. Anthropology was my friend, my serious companion.
Anthropology was what took me out of myself, stretched me, and kept me seeing. It opened the world for me. Not just the geographical world, but the actual world of gaps and edges, of contradiction and paradox and constant change. Anthropology destroyed the certainty of my upbringing; it taught me to play with difference. It taught me to dance. -And anthropology's dance was thought itself; its music was ambiguity:
the rhythm of clarity slipping way. Anthropology gave me the gift of sliding thought.”
After ten years of anthropology, he began to make art.
New York, in the early seventies was a hot bed of change in all the arts. Everything seemed possible.
Nonas began to seriously make and show work there. From the beginning, he used only ordinary and familiar
materials; stones, wood, steel arranged in simple and easily recognized forms. Mario Merz said that the problem
for every artist is the same: just adding or removing. Nonas’ work sits on the narrow edge where one becomes the
other.
Some have called Nonas’ work minimalist, but what he shares with the minimalists is only a vocabulary of simple
forms. Nonas's aim is always emotional power and presence, not the cold rigor of minimalist reduction. His work
speaks to both the head and the stomach. He says he builds places; objects that feel like places, that change the
world like places do.
NO-WATER-IN was made by Richard Nonas with the collaboration of Filippo Fossati for Alessandro Pasotti e Fabrizio Padovani of Galleria P420. For the event Nonas has done an artist book available on request in the gallery along with the exhibition catalogue.