Sergio
Nates
Media:
Painting, Mixed Media
Studio Location:
43-01, 22nd St Long Island City, NY 11101 United States
Room/Studio#
#236
Website:
Artist Bio:
Sergio Nates is a Mexican born artist based in New York whose work investigates the way images are formed through memory, perception, and lived experience. His practice grows out of a lifelong tendency to understand the world visually rather than through spoken language. From an early age he drew, dismantled objects, rebuilt them, and used images as a means to think, communicate, and make sense of his surroundings.
Working on raw canvas, Nates creates large scale compositions that merge abstraction with echoes of the figure. He constructs layered structures where fragments, gestures, and perceptual impressions coexist without fully resolving into representation. The paintings reflect the internal visual worlds that arise behind closed eyes and the ways the mind reconstructs meaning from accumulated experience. His work sits in the space between recognition and dissolution, offering shifting forms that evoke bodies, architectures, and psychological states.
His artistic language is informed by the visual and architectural landscape of Mexico City, where he grew up surrounded by modern design, functionalist architecture, and the legacy of Mexican abstraction. The influence of Gunther Gerzso, Mathias Goeritz, Manuel Felguerez, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Georges Mathieu, Helen Frankenthaler, Lebbeus Woods, and Robert Rauschenberg shapes the conceptual foundation of his practice. Their impact is visible not through direct reference but through an interest in structure, gesture, spatial tension, and the negotiation between chaos and order.
Since relocating to New York, Nates has expanded his focus to include the perceptual and emotional atmosphere of the city. The works developed in his Long Island City studio absorb the rhythms of urban encounters, the movement of crowds, fleeting gestures, and the psychological charge of the city. These paintings do not depict New York but reflect the ways the city alters the internal images that guide his work.
Artist Statement:
My work constructs abstract spaces shaped by memory, identity, and the layered experience of living between cultures.
I work from internal images the fragments of memory, sensation, and imagination that surface before language. My identity has always been layered: Mexican and Jewish, shaped by families who migrated from Lithuania, Poland, and Cuba, and later myself an immigrant in the United States. Living between cultures taught me to see the world through multiple perspectives at once. That sense of displacement and multiplicity forms the foundation of my visual language.
Each painting begins in silence, in the moment where nothing has taken shape and the first impulse emerges. I do not start with a fixed image. I allow stains, fragments, and accidents to become part of the vocabulary, letting intuition guide the logic of the composition. My background in industrial design informs the structural intelligence that develops inside the abstraction edges, tensions, spatial negotiations, and systems of order that appear and dissolve. The work is not designed; it is revealed through a dialogue with the unknown.
The images I construct come from the way we “learn to see”: traces of memory, after-visions, unresolved thoughts, archetypal forms, and sensations that appear when the mind drifts between attention and interiority. In my paintings, shadows may have more than one direction and perspectives can overlap. This is intentional a reflection of how internal images exist before they align with reality. The paintings become psychological spaces where contradictions coexist and meaning emerges slowly.
