My paintings and assemblages focus on the themes of personal memory, and nostalgia, by utilising various objects, colours, collections, and mixed media. Delving into the significance of personal artefacts (often found in my father’s garage) and the memories associated with them, the work invites viewers to engage with the emotional resonance of these mementoes. I am thinking a lot about the influence of the Bauhaus artists - particularly Klee, Moholy-Nagy, but also Schwitters, Paolozzi, Blake through the invention of the surface and structure.
The choice of colour and structure often comes from childhood memories. Left sitting in smoky jazz clubs listening to my mother sing, or visits to my father’s workplace - restaurants such as Le Caprice. The layering of found objects in the garage such as washers, sheet music, tools, door knobs, help make choices of colour and structure.
Developing the approach through different methods of collage both harmonious and contradictory, each shape has specific characteristics. Elements of Improvisation and some pre-determined characteristics collide in an intuitive approach to both memory and time.
Perhaps the paintings are portals or windows to both memory and place. The structures operate between instinctive compositional devices and collisions of geometry and the unpredictability/predictability of colour relationships. The colour is built up through close tones in an intimate and personal way, through transparency and opacity, allowing the colour to permeate the relationships.
In utilising many of these elements in constructions and paintings, I like to keep an open approach reliant on the environment and experimentation, eliciting a human response to the mysterious and forgotten items and their poetic sense of history.
Laurence Noga 2026
Multi-media artist Laurence Noga is admired for his series of striking geometric abstract paintings and colourful, yet architectonic collages assembled from industrial materials and found objects. It can be said that Noga’s paintings evoke a dense world of floating geometries, embodying a new view of pattern and form while also recalling the forms of the Bauhaus painters like Josef Albers. Conversely Noga’s collages work reminds one of the understated yet painterly sculptures of Henri Laurens and the painting of Albert Gleizes particularly in the juxtaposition of a chromatic minimalism with the enigmaticism of neo-Cubist assemblage.
Noga’s wall based collage and painting works begin with a support either canvas or MDF an composite wood, a layering process allows a configuration of coloured Perspex, found objects, paper cuttings and pigment. The artist describes this stage as an intuitive act which is in turn followed by a more purposeful application of materials and forms. In this secondary stage, Noga adds architectural elements creating “disruptions and boundaries towards an industrialization of memory, which reflects my long term interest in the Bauhaus and particularly artists such László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Paul Klee.” Many of the elements the artist incorporates come from his father’s collection of objects and memorabilia (books, menus, photographs, tools and washers). The evocation of mystery and memory in these captivating works is “an open approach reliant on the environment and experimentation, alongside a human response to the mysterious, and forgotten items and their poetic sense of history.”
Throughout his practice, Laurence Noga seeks to reveal a sense of personal memory within the context of a geometric space punctuated by colour. The presence of traditional painterly mark making and found objects allows a complex yet haptic experience of art. In doing so he has created a new genre of collage making and a compelling interpretation of geometric abstraction.
Rosa JH Berland
