For Frieze London 2022, Josh Lilley is pleased to present a solo booth of works by Nick Goss.

The places in Nick Goss’s new paintings are ones you think you know. A cocktail, a pot plant, plastic chairs and rear-view mirrors: all these details, precisely noticed, invite an impression of familiarity. The specificity of Goss’s attention, translated into a momentary sharpness of tone and contour, roots his work in the here and now, then gently unravels it. The key is in the mazy thoughts that a buzzed reverie, or hours of slow jolting travel, might set loose, especially when nudged by a peripheral event: the sheen on a beer pump, or the pattern on a seat. These are the half-registered sights that open themselves out into something other. And the paintings are full of moments in which the solid framing of the stable world gives onto views that unmoor it. Looking out from the inside is the prevailing situation. You’re neither here nor there.

Take a surface in one of Goss’s paintings and let it show you what took place before, let it unburden itself of what happened next. Deci- sions of the past, by virtue of the artist’s blanched touch and the gauzy layers of paint, remain visually available to us. Sections of mottled print, like messages from another world, flicker on and off. This simultaneity is a kind of haunting. In this way the ordinary places in which his scenes appear – a market stall, bar or café, beach or bus – dislodge themselves from ordinary time and become something outside of it: neither now nor then. It’s not simply that the layers of the past become active agents in our encounters with the work: it’s that the temporality of the work itself remains continually out of reach. The paintings’ intransigence to a historical read (the when of the paintings, which is never quite clear), as well as their indistinct art-historical lineage, keeps this indeterminacy live.

Because paintings are like walls, they always end up bodying forth absent spaces, first that of the studio, then that of the gallery wall, then other walls, other spaces. Goss’s work makes his medium’s entanglements with these lost spatial and temporal contexts visible, accessible. Haunted by its pasts, by its places, by its own sequences of mark-marking, Goss’s painting holds tensions it can’t, or won’t, resolve. Even the words we use to describe what we’re seeing are themselves full of false floors, swinging open to reveal a lower level that itself swings open just as we find our footing.

- Ben Street, September 2022