Nicholas Hales is an artist invested in the quiet and sustained practice of investigating the self. As a painter, he draws from the outcomes of this meditative process in order to produce layered and abstract works that resound with a contemplative stillness.

For Hales, painting is both a process of looking inward, and a way of opening up space for others to do the same. It is this dual process that’s at the centre of Shodhana (purification), the artist’s latest collection of paintings on exhibition at SMAC gallery.

‘Shodhana’ is a Sanskrit word for ‘cleansing’, ‘rectification’, or ‘purification’. In yoga, one’s conditioning or trauma is held in the chakras, or spiritual centres. Energy will move through the human energy system and purify these spiritual centres. Each centre bearing a different colour. Hales’ work uses this colour system and purification process, and can be read either as purification of an individual or the collective.

“I’m interested in imbalances in the individual, and in processes which bring about healing and wholeness, particularly meditative and contemplative modalities that quiet the mind,” says Hales in an interview with Artistcloseup.

Abstraction, then, becomes a useful genre to work with. If our minds, by nature, are compelled to make sense and to interpret, then abstraction serves as a necessary refusal of reason – the right to stop making sense of the external world, and turn inwards. But rather than simply turning away from the din of daily life, Hales is committed to the enduring ability of art to help us make sense of the world, by first prompting us to understand ourselves.

Though the artist has always been interested in the idea of his art being a portal into a self-reflexive and ruminative space, the global COVID-19 pandemic brought about a significant moment in his career. For Hales, it was during this period of pause and isolation that so many found themselves turning inwards, surfacing suppressed emotions and resulting in widespread introspection and spiritual awakening.

Through his considered use of colour, soft gradients, and choice linework, Hales’ work opens up space for continued reflection, self-awareness and the surfacing of emotion.

The paintings in Shodhana (purification) avoid neat interpretation, and are the result of a process that embraces the incidental, the spiritual, and the immaterial without veering into entropy or ambiguity.

At the core of the Cape Town-based artist’s practice is a balance between vulnerability and structure, colour and form. Most often, Hales works with acrylics and oils – an intuitive and meditative process of layering and mark-making.

While the under painting is comprised of gestural, personal mark making, the airbrushed, blurring fields point to the transpersonal. The clear lines, indicative of the individual, work against these vast blurring fields that point towards the infinite.

“When I’m developing work, I’m aware of symbols and colours and what they might mean, but it’s more a process of letting the subconscious bring them to the surface,” says Hales. “I am first trying to get a painting to work on purely painting terms, but there is also a resonance I’m trying to get in each work, like a turning fork. When those two things come together, I know the work is finished.”

Here, Hales is able to locate spirited composition within abstraction. Glowering reds emanate from the centre of the canvas, resting above swathes of lazuline blue, while florid purples drape down the side of the canvas, first in certain, solid lines, then in softer movements, not so much blending as they are diffusing, emanating into the rest of the canvas.

Herein lies the invitation: give yourself permission to linger, to look without the pursuit of certainty, to see what surfaces in the image, and in your mind. Figures flare up and fade away.

Thoughts crystalise and dissipate. In these myriad scenes there are echoing sunsets, shifting mountains, slow oceans, and the passing of time. Only the colours remain consistent – the corporeal reds and transcendent golds.

It’s in this alchemical space, somewhere between tension and placidity, folly and lucidity, the personal self and the trans-personal self, that Hales’ purification can be found.