A Venus flytrap's color and shape attract many unsuspecting creatures that end up struggling in the quick clamp of its jaws. Nichole van Beek's work contains the same beautiful lethality, at once attractive but silently menacing and primal. The graceful line work is reminiscent of 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel¹s drawings of underwater life, but rather than moving with a scientist's precision, her lines move with plump vigor, undulating along the cool colors of the pencil and gouache.
A scientist's studies of flora and fauna attempt to capture natural phenomenon, but van Beek's appear more interested in preternatural phenomenon: creatures, plants, and events of another world, stranger and more inexplicable than our own. A few pieces - such as "Proctor & Gamble Poison Animals" - obviously have some dull political axe to grind, but they remain infected with iridescent creatures and landscapes. The ruddy health of her line work almost carries it away into creampuff clouds, but the few nods to figuration‹gloved hands, toothy mouths, pink-suited scientists - give a startling reality to the floating fantasies. Lest we forget, some flowers have teeth.
Though it sometimes sparkles with the empty gloss of lifestyle art, there¹s something stranger beneath the surface, a game of intuition and sickness, the clarity of manufactured goods mixed with a gross sensuality, a commitment to permutations of color and form. In the world of Nichole van Beek, the end comes with neither a bang nor a whimper, but in a drifting, billowing blur of color that transfixes us in ecstasy as it consumes us.
