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Honey, I’m Not Doing So Well stitches together an immensity of snapshot-like vignettes that capture the lustre, aspirational hedonism, melodrama and melancholy of contemporary youth culture.
Southern Guild is pleased to present Honey, I’m Not Doing So Well by emerging artist Nano Le Face. Within each flattened frame – reduced to cross-hatched colour and line – Le Face uses a lexicon of popular iconography and text as a means of sardonic storytelling and visual processing.
The immediacy of Nano’s chosen medium – coloured pencil and wax crayon on paper – is an apt vehicle for an insatiable maker. Drawing on discarded packaging, pulled pages from old books and the back of used envelopes, his work is the conceptual conduit for his lived and virtual experience. The artist’s social exchanges, overheard conversations and consumed digital content are urgently filtered through a prolific process of making.
Born in Tshwane (1999), Nano came to art-making during the COVID pandemic after a stint studying film. Self-taught, he spent a two-month period as artist-in-residence at the GUILD Residency in Cape Town earlier this year. The residency prompted a notable upscaling of his work, largely informing his presented series of drawings.
Within each flattened frame – reduced to cross-hatched colour and line – Nano uses a lexicon of popular iconography and text as a means of sardonic storytelling and visual processing. His scrawled witticisms and borrowed aphorisms from film, music and literature contemplate the assimilated aspirations and existential hunger of his generation. The viewer becomes a privy voyeur, gaining access to moments of intimacy and confidential longing. These subjects’ temporal desires chronicle a broader observation of the Americanised models of success, visibility and beauty that characterise today’s virtual realm.
The artist’s sorority of female figures emotionally span both self-obsession and self-deprecation, come-hither bravado and raw vulnerability. Some of these idolised figures have been drawn from women in the artist’s life; their likenesses reflect the dichotomous reality of coming of age in a world whose social structures are in a state of dissolution and perpetual reinvention. Nano’s creative output is indicative of an artist born of this ‘Instagram generation’, the sheer repetition of his female figures echoes the mass production of consumerist culture and the ubiquity of content-producing influencers.
Within each flattened frame – reduced to cross-hatched colour and line – Nano uses a lexicon of popular iconography and text as a means of sardonic storytelling and visual processing. His scrawled witticisms and borrowed aphorisms from film, music and literature contemplate the assimilated aspirations and existential hunger of his generation. The viewer becomes voyeur, privy to moments of intimacy and confidential longing. His subjects’ temporal desires chronicle a broader observation of the Americanised models of success, visibility and beauty that characterise today’s virtual realm.
The artist’s sorority of female figures emotionally span both self-obsession and self-deprecation, come-hither bravado and raw vulnerability. Some of these idolised figures have been drawn from women in the artist’s life; their likenesses reflect the dichotomous reality of a coming of age in a world whose social structures are in a state of dissolution and perpetual reinvention. Nano’s creative output is indicative of an artist born of the ‘Instagram generation’, the sheer repetition of his female figures echoes the mass production of consumerist culture and the ubiquity of content-producing influencers.
Nano Le Face
Nano Le Face
A well-intentioned if not misguided sentiment, 2023Mixed media on paper
40⅛ x 63¾ x 1⅝ in.
Nano Le Face
Still between two men with reputations to uphold, 2023Pencil crayon, acrylic, masking tape on paper
39⅜ x 59 in.
Nano Le Face
Random events in a thriving universe no.25, 2022Pen, pencil crayon on found paper
11¾ x 9½ x 0¾ in.
Nano Le Face
Yes, of course we care honey, 2023Yes, of course we care honey, 2023
35⅜ x 43¼ x 1⅝ in.
Nano Le Face
Between two men with reputations to uphold, 2023Pen, pencil crayon on paper
21¼ x 24⅜ x 1⅝ in.
Nano Le Face
She reads the Tarot and the NY Times, 2023Wax crayon, masking tape on paper
29½ x 39⅜ in.
Nano Le Face
I thought I was sane and on top of the world, 2023Pen, pencil crayon on paper
15⅜ x 26¾ x 1⅝ in.
Nano Le Face
As far as science is in a position to reassure you, 2023Pencil crayon, masking tape on paper
39⅜ x 29½ in.
Nano Le Face
I feel like an old man on a hot day, 2023Pen, pencil crayon on paper
23¼ x 15 x 1⅝ in.
Nano Le Face
Self-doubt, self-obsession & nudity, 2023Pen, pencil crayon on paper
20½ x 13¾ x 1⅝ in.
Nano Le Face
A large success and a personal failure, 2023Pencil crayon, masking tape on paper
43¼ x 33½ x 1⅝ in.