Panorama

A Painting by Nick Jorgensen

This summer longs to be over. The heat suffocates my brain, and I relay the sun’s injustice. Lately, I have not been in
touch with reality and I have been a bad friend to Nick and others. Nick and I have grown codependent over the past
year. We are opposites of each other, so there is magnetism, which I like, but he can be restrained in an extremely
frustrating way and I indulge my impulses to antagonize to where I likely damage his reputation as a gallerist in New York
City. I think he wants to retain a sense of neutrality within his social environment, which I think for him is impossible
considering who he surrounds himself with.

The other day he was flirting with a girl at a thing and I interrupted him and he brought it up to me resentfully on our way
back to our neighborhood. I thought he was joking but he was actually pissed off. In my defense we were fixing to leave
and it didn’t really seem like he was flirting. I understand the urgency, and in a way I admire his commitment to instinct.
You could get hit by a car tomorrow and lose function from the hips down and wouldn’t be able to fuck ever again in your
life.

We both find ourselves in an isolated way and often we complain to each other about it. Our isolation is not in the
physical sense. I encourage him to offload his faults to the external. That he is never wrong and he is a tragic reflection
of the modern world’s social and moral ills. I encourage him to believe that he is some kind of scapegoat and that he is
divinely protected. I encourage him to believe that he is being taken advantage of by other people in his milieu and that
I’m the only person he can trust. Sometimes I worry he’s too inward to think critically about my position in his life, but I
stick around anyway because I lack the decency to leave him in peace. Although one time he asked me in earnest if I
feel empathy so I think we are both aware, or at least in suspicion, that I am a negative presence.

Nick asked me to write this press release because I’m the wrong person to do it. He said I could write whatever I wanted,
which I think is probably stupid. He is burnt out and not thinking straight. He seems to be impressed with my ability to talk
inexhaustibly and formlessly. I think I am a surrogate for the anal catharsis he is reluctant to feel.

Nick would probably like for me to talk about his art rather than our relationship. Lately he’s been saying stuff like “I want
you to critique my art and I want you to be super brutal and honest” or stuff like “I want you to critique my entire identity
and I want you to be super brutal and honest”. I honestly don’t know how to respond to these requests and frankly it feels
a bit perverted like he’s asking to be spanked. This is understandable though, cruelty is a form of acceptance and
recognition. I’d prefer to be cruel than to ignore him entirely. I could probably whisper him something about himself that
would cause him to spiral indefinitely and it would be an affectionate gesture. He could do that to me for sure. We all
could to each other, yet we really try hard not to and that’s what makes humanity a beautiful and terrifying thing. As
animals we have been blessed with senses outwards but not inwards. Nick settles this reality by painting what’s right in
front of him. I didn’t know this style was called plein air until like five months ago. Sometimes he asks me if I like this
painting of a tree he made. Sure I do. I like trees. I like snow and I like most chairs and some rooms. I like Nick. Nick has
an approach to painting that is clearly an extension of his stoner-utilitarian approach to things. Things are there and they
are pretty. Everything else is excessive and unnecessary.

There is a conservatism to Nick’s style, and to his being. I think this is a common thing with people from the mountains.
Even on a logistical level, it was historically tough to bring food and supplies up a mountain. It was even harder to drag
culture and other world-connecting information up there too. Mountain cultures are considerably more individualistic and
self-reliant than coast, flatland or arctic cultures. Your direct, unquestioned reality was the only thing that mattered, all the
while surrounded by nature. Whatever existed outside of these confines was a speculative nebula. Nick was only born
amidst the few remaining whispers of this design in his native Colorado and the relationship between the mountain and
the outside has since then atomized and become a relationship between the person and the magma rumbling under the
conscious membrane. Make yourself aloof to the existence of either thing, and suddenly nature will remind you that you
are too its child and find a way to vengefully speak its ancient language through you in twin drives – beauty and brutality
– sex and death. Kind of like Nick snapping at me for interrupting him while trying to get laid.

Nick’s art has a black metal ethos. Black metal, originating from a similar biosocial atmosphere, for example would have
emerged and been forgotten like most punk subgenres without Dead’s suicide by buckshot, or the church burning and
stabbing bandmates to death. I think of Charles Manson’s songwriting as well, they’re good songs but what makes them
hit is that they’re by Charles Manson. I don’t think Nick’s art fails without that type of context, but I think it’s interesting to
watch him do his thing and the images that emerge, thinking about where I know him from. I’ve seen him be compared to
Monet and to Van Gogh. I don’t think those who have made these comparisons have lived lives with enough contrast.
When I see Nick I see Manson. I see Jim Jones. I see Nero and Idi Amin and Suharto and Pinochet and every other false
idol who has roamed the planet at one point or another. The soothing, placid aesthetic of his works are an attempt to
mislead, to disarm and entrance. Luckily, I’m privy to a special vantage point that allows me to see through the
smokescreen to a screaming agonal panic that knows itself enough to not resolve into tyranny. To me this is the ultimate
act of selflessness and of restraint. He saves all of us from himself. Nicholas Jorgensen the self-crucifier – the self-tyrant
– self-knower – self-hangman – the bold Roman and the inward peering Jew in one being – the transcendent vector
salient from an enchanted brutal realism – the peacock refusing to spread his feathers.

I first heard of Nick in Denver through a DIY venue known as Rhinoceropolis, but had only met him once. His twin
brother Sam and him had a theory that they both died a few years ago and are now wandering the afterlife which I found
fried but relatable and kind of endearing. That was all I knew about them at that point, that they were some weird ghost
guys. We did hang out once though at the Yellow Deli on Pearl Street in Boulder. The Yellow Deli is a global sandwich
chain run by a cult of Messianic Jews meaning they’re Jews that believe Jesus is God. To work at Yellow Deli you have
to be in the cult and more than enough of the employees are hardworking children. We were there together with a friend
of ours who was a devoted patron until some of the Yellow Deli cultists started a brush fire near the western Boulder
suburb he’s from and wiped out his childhood home.

Denver is an enshrouded city and a headquarters for an inarticulable phantom structure. For more than a decade I’ve
been trying to articulate its enshroudedness to people at the risk of making myself seem like some batshit millenarian.
Despite its pristine, majestic beauty, the omens that Denver is pockmarked with form an unsolvable constellation riddle. It
begins when you land at the airport and you meet Blucifer. It’s the giant horse statue with glowing red eyes that fell on
and killed its creator. To me it’s not really the statue itself that’s shocking, it's the audacity of the city to place it there for
its visitors and returning residents to see. Either it’s a sadistic move or Denver city planners are such hylics they forgot to
consider omens that move like carbon monoxide, you don’t know you’ve been poisoned until you’re gasping for useless
air. It comes off as a threat.

Colorado has a specialty in incarceration, punishment, surveillance and military technology, in a much less rusted and
medieval way than the Angola penitentiary in Louisiana, for example. Maybe inspiration is drawn by the overbearing
presence of the mountains. In Florence exists the only supermaximum security prison in the U.S., the tightest level of
security a prison can obtain in America and therefore probably the world, holding the highest enemies of the state –
terrorists, street gang monarchs, high traitors and spies, stripped of as much freedom as is physically, psychologically
possible. The CIA is crawling through the University of Colorado looking for undergrad recruits for low-rank pencil
pushing paper shredder shit. We have the smaller of the two NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
wings in the U.S. in Boulder, arguably defining the industrial, infrastructural, financial and military pillars of our local
reality through the arbitration of global scientific standards and constants by humans like you and me of warm flesh and
blood. We invented the vehicle immobilization device, the boot, informally known as the Denver boot, and there are
nukes hiding in the mountains. Not to mention the mass shootings. If it has to do with making life hell in some way,
there’s probably some organization in Colorado to be held responsible. It’s probably the geography. The prehistoric and
calm oppressiveness of the Rocky Mountains form a basin at the bottom of which you are a panicked guppy. Your
agency is eclipsed by your small, strict role in a vast and mysterious ecology. Free will is an allergen and you are prone
to dissolve in resignation to the ecosystem. There is no ocean to escape to and the terrain is too jagged and tall to scale.
It’s the ideal geographical and social landscape for surveillance and control. Even the sun, shining pale and clinical there,
felt as if it had been replaced by a fluorescent lightbulb. It’s a natural prison and a manifestation of the Curse of the
Boulder Valley. The Denver Metropolitan Area encompasses everything along Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder and
Fort Collins plus a few other outlying municipalities—this is where the mechanism converges. It is one of the few
networked hubs in the U.S. from which all American lies originate.

Nick used to live on the corner of 17th and Washington next door to a lady I bought fake LSD from that witched out my
mind permanently. She was hosting satanic orgies while running a high traffic psychedelic drug operation and got visited
by the Feds. She disappeared. Nick got mugged on that corner too once and robbed of his art while he was knocked
unconscious. Bad things seemed to happen on the corner of 17th and Washington. I think negative energy isn’t an ever-
permeating gas but appears in the form of caves. You’re therefore accountable for your descent into one. Rock House
was a cave. Rhino, I think was a cave. Through a lens of drug-addled delusion I would at times find it not unreasonable
to suspect COINTELPRO-style infiltration, as people began overidentifying with their own egos as struggling artists or
“revolutionaries” to their own detriment and being swayed towards buttheaded flavors of radicalism that are easy to
systemically discredit. Losing your mind to heroic delusions became a rite of passage. The resultant identity disturbances
were flashed into each other’s minds telepathically and some became irreversibly imprinted.

As Denver continued to modernize from its cow town origins, accelerated by the legalization of weed drawing in
braindead morons from all around the country, Rhinoceropolis and its inhabitants began to encrypt in response to
macroeconomic feedback signals. The trope of the struggling artist was basically ubiquitous now within the warehouse.
And when you’re struggling for art it really makes your blood boil seeing some smug moron transplant from Brooklyn or
Portland paint your neighborhoods with a mosaic of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s pussy print or Einstein smoking a blunt with
Yoda or some shit and make at least a more than liveable wage off the commission and pat themselves on the back for
being heroes while raising the price of rent to near NYC levels and condescending you for your “parochial values”. Pair
this with the turbonormie cultural vapor emanating from the military and prison stuff, as it always does, and the image of
a cyclops begins to resolve in the mist. Soon thereafter, as a response to the Ghost Ship fire in the Bay Area,
Rhinoceropolis lost its zoning battle with the state government. Suicides followed because some couldn’t fathom an
unencrypted life in broad daylight. I couldn’t imagine one for them either.

But this isn’t Nick’s experience, it’s mostly mine. I can’t speak on his experiences too much out of fear of contaminating
his experience in general. Nick acted as the stabilizing wing of the organism of our five-to-six person coniferous symbiote
we had cultivated by necessity in Denver. He is a stabilizing wing and I am an apoptotic one. We have nuclei responsible
for biting our own wings off and adding wings to the cell and others for keeping them quantum entangled at a distance.
We have asterisks pointing out of our foreheads. We are an exclusive empathetic microeconomy (EEM). My experience
is his and his experience is mine. We are one mind, by contract, signed thousands of years ago by the patriform hands of
God.

The communication Nick and I share is often beyond verbal. As a system we interact through pyschic feedback. Maybe
he’s already skilled at that because he’s an identical twin.There is a dynamic spinning up between his mural and my
press release, which I don’t think is standard. The experiment was successful. We are separated from the rest of the
bigger organism, as a binary circuit but also coextending on an infinite horizontal plane. Nick thinks this is crack pipe shit.
To say otherwise would challenge the direct-realist mask he wears. Maybe I’m exaggerating our closeness. To get
through to him you need to apply a steady and predictable rhythm of water droplets on his head. He is born under the
sign of Taurus which is an earth sign so he is partially made of stone. Within the first year of dripping water on him it
seems like nothing is happening but continue applying rhythm and eventually he will erode and new striations will
emerge.

As I'm writing this, he is expanding his sexual imagery by painting a second female peacock which I think is a good sign
for the repressed mountain man. It's fascinating because you can visualize the desiring yarn-ball contort and writhe and
lash out like a solar flare while it attempts to hide itself against the gradual surrender of his protective psychic structures.
This game of peekaboo provides the potentiation necessary for eroticism. Nick's art is becoming paradoxically
conservative and erotic. All artists, all humans evolve but I think Nick unconsciously makes art out of his own evolution.
He is a life artist before he is a painter. This isn't a dig on his craft. On the contrary, I think this is the ideal organization of
the mind of the artist - to view the entirety of life as an expression of desire, of the will, and create paintings within
nature's brush strokes on time and space, sounds within the symphony of living, performances within the act of existing,
other analogies you could conjure according to that logic. Life is the master canvas with endless canvasses within, all
forming a concentric series. This series then forms a conical hierarchy with the widest circle at the bottom. The base is
filled with filth and chaos and hysteresis and joy and music and sound and color unbounded by the whalebone restraints
of the middle. Only a Messiah may take a panoramic view of the entire structure and make a meek statement of it.

— Naji Shamas