Artist Statement

Nicole Duval is an international artist based in New York City whose practice centers on oil painting. She remembers being told in kindergarten, you’re an artist, after her teacher saw one of her creations and she has carried that identity with her ever since. Working in a representational mode, Duval treats the painted surface as a site where familiarity and estrangement can exist at once. The work is often figurative, with forms that suggest a body, a presence, or a character even when the subject resists clear identification.

Duval’s work extends beyond the literal figure into paintings of unbaked braided dough. She builds the oil paint into a tactile, skin-like surface, sometimes glossy and smooth, sometimes thick and layered. The braided forms read as abstract extensions of her figurative work. She embraces the sensuous materiality of paint, letting the physical process of painting remain visible and felt. These images, drawn specifically from challah, operate as portraits. They are intimate, attentive, and quietly charged. The dough’s pale sheen and pliant folds evoke skin. She turns the braided form into something bodily, suggesting vulnerability, touch, and the porous boundary between object and person. Duval is drawn to the fact that her subject is often ambiguous. She invites the viewer to linger in the space between abstraction and recognition.

Duval heightens the sensuality of a material that is also ritual, transforming a ceremonial bread into a figure that feels simultaneously devotional and provocative. Whether painting bodies or objects, she approaches each subject as a portrait. Each is an encounter that insists on presence and on the charged, often ambiguous ways a painting can look back.