I’ve realized how important it is to take time to connect with the people and things you love, especially when you feel hopeless. These connections and the memory of these moments can remind us of who we are and what's important—and can provide answers on how to move forward.
— Arcmanoro Niles
Lehmann Maupin presents When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, an exhibition of new paintings on canvas by New York-based artist Arcmanoro Niles. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life, Niles turns to portraiture and still life painting in his latest series, exploring the poignancy and vulnerability of deep emotional connections to ordinary places, objects, and people. Across the exhibition, Niles employs his signature vibrant color palette and swaths of glitter to render tight compositions and focused, singular subject matter, delving into personal relationships and memories—or as critic Seph Rodney writes, to make “oil and acrylic paintings that do something unconventional under the cloak of conventionality.” This presentation comes on the heels of Niles' recent inclusion in exhibitions at the Barberini Palace in Rome, the Museum Kampa in Prague, and the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, NY; the show also precedes a summer 2026 solo museum exhibition of Niles’ work at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY.
Niles is known for his brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His work offers a window into colloquial moments of daily life―a woman seated at a restaurant table, a child eating an apple, an elderly man playing checkers―with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own record of contemporary life. The paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while referring to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, and Color Field painting. Influenced by poetry, Niles’ titles often suggest an underlying narrative behind the seemingly mundane scenes; at the same time, by pairing his own words and images, he seeks to convey a universal sense of emotional experience.
In When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, Niles’ compositions follow the logic of linear perspective, building environments and constructing scenes that feel lived and real. In contrast to this naturalistic structure, Niles’ treatment of his medium—both in color scheme and in the visible materiality of the paint—add an otherworldly or surreal quality to the works. Throughout his oeuvre and in this series, he makes unconventional choices when it comes to color, developing singular hues directly on the canvas by layering strokes of paint over a neon ground; his subjects’ dark skin tones are rendered with shades of blue or orange, clouds or flames are bright pink, and moments of glitter leap off the picture plane, as though hovering over its surface. The works in When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart are painted in a technicolor palette that constructs a signature kind of chiaroscuro, which serves to heighten both the drama and intimacy of his compositions.
Across the exhibition, Niles immerses himself in his intimate relationships to specific people and settings, capturing and elevating their essence through artmaking; his paintings crystallize memory, freezing moments in time. In In Between the Glory Days and Golden Years (200 Miles from Where I’ve Been) (2025), for example, Niles situates the viewer across the dining table from his subject—in this case, a middle-aged woman with glittering pink hair and a plaid shirt—with a piece of carrot cake in between, ready to be shared. To the subject’s left, the arm of a younger companion is just visible, suggesting the woman is part of a larger, celebratory gathering, perhaps intended to connect loved ones and mark a milestone. Niles’ composition implicates the viewer, along with their own familial ties and memories of the passage of time, in the narrative. In this way, Niles invites viewers to commune with their own inner lives and memories through interaction with his own.
In his deeply personal Where Do I Turn to When I Can’t Take It Anymore (All the Hope I Had I Hope I Wasn’t Wrong) (2025), the lone self-portrait in the series, Niles turns fully inward. Painted in melancholic shades of teal and periwinkle, the artist depicts himself lying in bed on his side next to an open box of tissues, his eyes open and looking vaguely ahead. The composition suggests a certain sadness—Niles’ forlorn expression is one of longing, or perhaps even heartbreak, probing loneliness and solitude in the wake of loss. Here and across the exhibition, Niles finds solace in connecting with others through the universal language of art marking, seeking to harness its capacity for catharsis and transformation. He finds solace in the mundane and everyday, “painting what he knows” to seek meaning and preserve memory.
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