In Conversation with Melissa Gurr, Nadja Sicamore, and Thomas Farol
Victoria Cunningham
March 1st, 2024
We all met in Melissa’s studio in Bushwick. Walking four blocks from the Morgan station to her building, I remembered how Brooklyn can feel like an alien planet sometimes. There were no people to be seen along Harrison Street today, and, amidst the eerie silence, I realized that I had not left the island of Manhattan for over three months. Melissa’s work has always had a magnetic effect on me though, and these questions have been weighing upon my mind for years.
Nadja was at the door when I arrived, as always in a stunning dress, one of her own paintings on muslin having been tailored by a friend, and we entered together. Meanwhile, Thomas was already in the studio, worn corduroy pants and a forest green collared shirt with an aged leather messenger bag in his lap. The scent of yerba mate was faint in the air, and Melissa in her immaculate white linen dress had gourds waiting for each of us, gourds and bambillas. As she had previously mentioned to me, she originally began studying painting in Buenos Aires.
Melissa’s studio was meticulously organized, every tube of pigment in its place, canvases stored away or elegantly displayed, and walls without a trace of a painter’s presence. It was uncanny in contrast to the trash-strewn streets and graffiti outside. I hesitated to say anything, but Nadja soon commented that she was not sure whether to be more horrified by what she was seeing or by the state of her own studio. Thomas laughed.
I was inspired to bring them all together one night while at happy hour with colleagues. I had been debating which one I should interview, and yet a conversation with only one of them felt as if it would land shy of the bigger picture I have been seeking to understand. Then I remembered a video from graduate school, a tripartite interview with Carl Rogers, Fritz Pearls, and Albert Ellis. Thus, triangulation suddenly became clear to me as the path forward into a deeper investigation regarding fundamental questions in painting that have been gnawing on my mind.
I first encountered Melissa’s work three years ago at a literary salon in the East Village. It was a private reading at the home of an acquaintance, one as similarly reticent and scrupulous as her. The movement in her paintings felt like the ocean at low tide. I experienced a visceral sensation of displacement that unsettled me within the harmony and flow of color. Additionally, the level of sophistication in her work was coupled with the nonchalance she demonstrated in an unforgettable first impression. There were no answers to my queries that night, merely an austere indifference and a redirection of my gaze to the canvas itself. I felt something significant in the painting, and the artist revealed herself to be an enigma whose work I have continued to follow piously. Fortunately, she has promised that today she will be more forthcoming.
Meanwhile, my first encounters with Thomas and Nadja’s work were on Instagram and at Tximeleta in Tribeca, respectively. As funny as it is that social media has become a legitimate place to make it as a painter, it is also tragic. Thomas’s first show that I attended was in partnership with another painter at Resolute Gallery in Chelsea. The other painter’s work was stunning online, and I was extremely eager to see it. However, when I arrived, his paintings were unbearably disappointing in real life—dull, details that felt egregious, something revoltingly disharmonious in the IRL gestalt, and a feeling that I could do it myself, but better—whereas I suddenly perceived something otherworldly in Thomas’s works. They felt as if they danced and were in a process of constant transformation.
Then, regarding Nadja’s work, our first meeting was much more traditional, albeit more recent. A new gallery opened on Walker Street, owned by a friend of a friend of a friend, and I swear one of the paintings appeared to me in a dream the night before the opening. Thus, I stood arrested before her Portrait of a Science, and I felt too overcome to muster the energy to introduce myself. However, Nadja ended up approaching me. As it turns out, she had read a blog post of mine ten years earlier while we were both in graduate school, Five Reflections on Dalí’s 50 Secrets. Additionally, we met for coffee the following week and found ourselves very likeminded, though with some disagreement about whether one is merely an inheritor of a preexisting “current” or a “source” of the surreal. Yet, as I have learned throughout the years, echo chambers only contain partial truths, and this meeting of the minds felt necessary to see beyond one perspective.
Ultimately, throughout the years, each of these painters have perplexed me and inspired my recent curiosities—the influence of dreams and the unconscious, the authority of the thing itself, as well as the advancement of the craft—so it only felt natural to speak with them in concert. I believe[d] that between us, a deeper truth might emerge beyond the obscurity I have been dwelling in myself, one that is greater than any of the subjectivities we have become. Yet still, as one of Melissa’s ethereal renderings continued drying in the other corner, I peered into each of the painters as into a foreign cosmos…
The Interview is available upon request in both prose and theater.
Teliost Language Services 