RICK VIAN

The Rapture of Understanding Nothing

Opening Reception:
Friday, April 17th | 6 - 9 PM

Exhibition on view April 17 - May 9, 2026

After decades of trying to understand the universe, and existence, and what we are, and how we should think, and behave and all that, I finally gave up; a long time ago. The only sensible thing left to do was to make art. For me that meant “to paint”. The problem remained as to what I was doing as an artist in the midst of all this. Since I am now fairly secure in the fact that I understand Nothing, (and “understanding Nothing” is not the same as “not understanding anything”) I approach a canvas in the same way I approach the universe. I am confronted with chaos in which I seek some kind of order. The chaos consists in all the blind, random marks I put all over the canvas to start the painting. The order is all of the shapes and composition that I find in that chaos and create out of the mess; rethinking, reworking, over and over, until it looks like something that has always been there.