Shades of Blue: Nicholas Grafia
Taking its title from pop culture—specifically Lana Del Rey’s haunting ballad—Shades of Blue is not merely an aesthetic cue, but a poetic threshold into Nicholas Grafia’s evolving lexicon of queer affect, temporality, fluid identities, and speculative mythologies. As with much of Grafia’s work, the mode of entry is accessible, but it unfolds into a densely packed field of personal and collective memory, emotional inheritance, and the reconstitution of lost or fragmented histories—particularly those drawn from decolonized Asian folklore and diasporic experience. Here, both the shade, a term for insults thrown, and the blue are personal, the pain and the oceans crossed. Revealing the often-disguised parallels between forced and voluntary migration, teasing out the blurry, ambivalent terrain of diasporic life—where displacement and reinvention coexist. These painted and performed portals plot an autofictional and embodied aesthetic: multiple gazes, skin tones, and genders—often within a single figure—living within flamboyant color and porous edgings.
Born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and a Black American father, Grafia’s mixed heritage shapes both the content and structure of his work—racially, culturally, and affectively. His figures, much like himself, occupy hybrid space, animated by the necessity to morph, camouflage, and endure. Blue also finds form in Grafia’s enduring allegorical reference to Mystique, the shape-shifting mutant from X-Men, whose skin—like his own figures—is mutable, in flux. “Most of my figures are like shape-shifters,” the artist notes. “Being a shape-shifter also means adaptability and flexibility. I feel like this trait is one that marginalized subjects often inhabit. Being able to adapt is a means of survival.”
From the melancholic erotics of Joni Mitchell and the luminous precision of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets to Matisse’s Modernist blue cut-outs and the spectral presence of Carrie Mae Weems’s Blue Black Boy, the color blue becomes a prism through which Grafia explores loss, longing, doubling, mourning, and survival. He draws from a broad lineage of blue’s symbolic and poetic charge—from Joan Miró’s 1925 phrase This Is the Color of My Dreams to Helen Frankenthaler’s assertion that “an inch of blue is nothing like a mile of blue.” Scale matters. Grafia deftly toggles between small ballpoint pen drawings that invite intimate proximity and large-scale canvases that command physical distance. The interplay becomes a meditation on closeness, estrangement, and attention—who has ours, and whose we can hold.
Grafia works across painting, performance, video, and text to construct emotionally charged tableaux where myth, pop culture, and speculative narrative collide. Known for his surreal, camp, and tender compositions, he draws on oral storytelling and folklore—especially where the historical record is fragmented or absent. His figures are masked, doubled, and caught mid-transformation. “Gateways into another dimension,” Grafia calls them—apparitions rather than portraits, scripts for performances not yet staged, or visual echoes of volatile memory.
“I want to irritate any straightforward reading of my works,” Grafia explains. “That’s why I love unresolved compositions, with atypical color schemes… These multiple gazes, skin tones, and genders—often within one figure—are how I map freedom into the image.”
At its core, Shades of Blue is an affective archive: a space for what escapes historical documentation but lingers in the body’s memory. The exhibition revisits motifs from Grafia’s past works—twins, portals, masks, voices possessed—and invites new presences into the frame, expanding the terrain without resolving its open-endedness.
These images behave like contemporary folklore: fragmented, excessive, uncanny. They live in the negative space—beneath representation, at the edge of visibility—where form falters and something else begins. Refusing to settle into dominant aesthetic regimes, Shades of Blue lingers at the threshold: between tradition and modernity, folklore and pop, representation and its impossibility.
