Edition: U.S. / Global

ART;Painting as Fast and Furiously as He Can

Published: November 5, 1995

NIKKO'S NOT LEAVING the house. Nikko's leaving the house only when he has to. He'll leave to get more glue. He'll leave to take his 90-year-old great-aunt for their weekly lunch. He'll leave to pick up his girlfriend's 5-year-old son from school. But otherwise, Nikko is home.

It's six weeks before his first major one-man show at the Dillon Gallery in SoHo, and since March, since the Ross Bleckner Show at the Guggenheim That Changed Nikko's Life, the 31-year-old artist has been painting nonstop. But now his work is divided: there's pre-Bleckner Sedgwick and post.

Nikko answers the door carrying a tracing pad and a pen. He's wearing desert boots and shorts. He speaks with emphasis. He says "thank God" a lot and knocks wood. High praise is "not too shabby." He's over 6 feet tall and casually handsome. There's that space between his front teeth women say means something.

Nikko needs 17 paintings for his show. He has 13. With six weeks to go, is he worried? "Yeah, I work constantly," he says. "If I didn't have a show coming up, I could easily do four major pieces in the next month and a half. But let's face it, I'm a New York Jew. If I can feel anxiety about something, I'll feel anxiety."

In 1990, according to the United States Census, there were slightly more than 15,000 painters in New York City. There are roughly 300 galleries that exhibit contemporary work. Since galleries don't represent 50 artists apiece, and since the established ones don't "discover" people, most artists work their whole lives without getting a one-man show in New York.

Nikko lucked out in 1987 when a teacher praised his work to Robert Mango, a painter who was about to open a gallery in TriBeCa. Mr. Mango showed Nikko's work until 1991, when the gallery closed.

Then in March 1994, Valerie Dillon, who worked in three galleries before finding backers for her own, signed a 10-year lease on a space at 431 West Broadway. Ms. Dillon, who is 33 and comes from Zimbabwe, picked up Mr. Mango, who told her about Nikko. Nikko signed on, along with eight other New York artists, including those Ms. Dillon calls her "top three": Alexander Kaletski, Patricia Nix and Makoto Fujimura. From group shows with a few sales, Nikko Sedgwick would suddenly see his work on the main drag in the middle of the SoHo art scene.

Nikko's Studio

Nikko's studio is in the apartment his mother, Pat, grew up in, a prewar on Broadway in the 80's with long halls, big windows and heavy wooden doors. The studio is 18 feet by 12 feet. Two trays hold 300 audio tapes: Monk, Hot Tuna, Billie, Bessie, the King. There's a Nordic Track, containers with pens, a photo of the singer Ray Charles, a chair covered in pony skin, Kitty Litter for his girlfriend Gabriela's cats, a stack of finished canvases and stretching pliers that resemble a hammerhead shark.

Nikko tears a page off his tracing pad and explains his new technique. "I'll make a form that I like," he says. "Then I'll make literally hundreds of tracings of it with water-soluble ink. And then I just glue them onto the canvas in a grid pattern. Then, when you dilute the ink with a liquid adhesive, all of the colors that go into making the ink black are released, so you get this vast spectrum of colors. Different adhesives yield different colors."

A painting could take 100 tracings. Nikko has enough to start one. He tears an 8-foot-by-6-foot piece of cotton duck off a roll. Bob Dylan fills the room: "When you said you knew me, I believed you did." When he gets it hanging right, Nikko pulls the canvas tight and staples it to the wall. He twirls the staple gun around his finger like a cowboy, then pins tracings to the canvas in an upside-down L shape, six across, five down.

What Is a Painting?

The first time you see a post-Bleckner Sedgwick, you're not sure what you're looking at. A biomorphic form is replicated countless times. With almost printlike precision, it marches back and forth across the canvas. It emerges, and yet it's one with the background. It's mysterious. The shapes are organic but nothing you recognize. They could be bones or orecchiette pasta. The colors are earthy and evoke Rembrandt. They have the kind of depth that comes from slavish glazing, though Nikko has stopped using paint. Sometimes there are drips.

"Everything that happens, happens," Nikko explains. "I want every step that goes in the making of the piece to be documented in the piece."

Despite the presence of form and color, Nikko thinks of the work as monochromatic. "It's seemingly antithetical, but when you repeat the same form over and over, it renders the form redundant to the point where it's robbed it of its usual meaning. And so I think of this" -- he points to a multicolored painting -- "as a red painting. I really like to think of the paintings as that simple."

His First Epiphany

When Nikko was 8 and living in the fabled twin-tower El Dorado on Central Park West, his mother, who was divorced, married Ben Heller, a real estate developer and art dealer. Mr. Heller's name is carved in gold on the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum.