Nicodim

LOW VOICE OUT LOUD, Rae Klein’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, is a series of personal and biographical portraits of traumas and delights blended together when the power flips on-off-on-off, etc. Each canvas is a window from a perspective that switches between omnipotence and weightlessness at a moment’s notice. In “Burn to the Ground,” a silhouette foregrounds a candelabra, inversing the relationship between shadow and cave wall and exposing its very source of light. “Glass Pony” depicts a pony-shaped portal between the viewer’s perch and a constellation of nearby stars. “In the Highest House in the Whole City” is an aura-Polaroid of the surreal and the sublime. These are the quiet moments between darkness and light, the low voice sung out loud.

Us, Kremer’s fourth solo exhibition with Nicodim, implicitly binds the viewer to the communities on his canvases. In “Gathering (XXIII),” 2021, our gaze is fixed from around the corner. We are voyeurs, first upon a partitioning of eight individual colors, then a partially disrobed foursome, then another individual, watching us watching them. The setting of “Gathering (XXXIII),” 2021, is foregrounded by a disembodied hand—it could be our hand—pulling back the curtain on four figures rendered in a single shade as they piece themselves together in carnal delight, each appendage and embrace delineated by the weight of Kremer’s brushstrokes. He strokes us all onto the same plane, the same existence. It’s a bit uncomfortable, and not without a sense of mischief, but his approach is sincere and considered. In this body of work, every body is a part of the action, communally. All of us.