Phoebe Nesgos

, 2024
Oil on canvas
72 x 36 inches
(PN2407)

, 2024
Oil on canvas
70 x 60 inches
(PN2405)

, 2024
Oil on canvas
80 x 60 inches
(PN2403)

, 2024
Oil on canvas
80 x 60 inches
(PN2402)

, 2024
Oil on canvas
70 x 60 inches
(PN2404)

, 2024
Oil on wood panel
20 x 16 inches
(PN2401)

Shipwrecks, shipwrecked, creatures of the evening. Stone shadows.


Skin punctured, life brutalized by tubes, rods, planks, and shards. Bodies and minds in pieces, an intimacy with states of psychic implosion and fragmentation. Sorrow. Metaphors of entrapment and of savagery proper. Smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our poverty, our discoveries, our progress.

Phoebe Nesgos’s process is one of palimpsest. Bodies are captured and architectures rendered, then translated through paint and systematically effaced before she begins again, layer by layer, bleeding the canvas with her coats of history and revision. The illustrated violence is enforced by the aggression committed to the painting’s surface with her sanded erasures.

If her earlier body of work was composed of the meadows and moors and their clinging roots, of women wandering through the heath and twilit country, here we have mangled limbs—machinic, fuzzy, smooth and soft—Arachnein the gloaming. Scaffolding and hardware are presented as anatomical forms, melding into derma as they evoke their own corporeality.

Any fear of breakdown is the memory of a breakdown that has already occurred. I think these are pictures made by a painter who intuits this with her body and her hand. Both in their subject matter and process of becoming, they are self-portraits and self-autopsies.

We are far from the source of light. We knowthings that make a simple faith hard to hold, hard to grasp, hard to wrestle, yet still she searches for theories of grace, awaiting some indeterminable day of judgment.