It’s no surprise that California-born artist Nicholas Cueva draws heavily on his childhood in the Calvary Chapel Surfing Association for his show “Sex Wax.” The show ran for just over one month, from April 11 – May 12, 2019. What is surprising is that Cueva has virtually no surfing experience. He was raised in the depths of 1980s California surfing culture, but a congenital heart condition rendered surfing too dangerous to ever seriously consider. However, that doesn’t mean surf culture hasn’t become emblazoned in Cueva’s life and art.

“My parents converted to a church that was very surfing-oriented, and most of the lectures had to do with surfing,” he says. The church community helped his parents cope with Cueva’s health struggles. “When I survived, I was used as an example of the miracles,” he says. “Because of my condition, it’s dangerous for me to surf, and although I have tried it, I am very bad at it. I get nervous because I can’t get hit on the chest.”

“Sex Wax” was open for just over one month, from April 11 – May 12, 2019, and featured a variety of paintings on fabric, all stemming from what he calls his childhood in a “surfing church.” Raised by Christian parents committed to helping revitalize the church via the laidback surfing vibe of their environment, Cueva’s complex relationship with surf culture is at the heart of “Sex Wax.”

Many of the pieces feature a voyeuristic element, with surfers—often largely unrecognizable as an “every-surfer”—being watched from the shore. Knowing Cueva’s personal background, this angle is relatively easy to understand. Cueva has said that “what you see” isn’t necessarily what he painted or intended, and encourages viewers to experience the exhibit with their own natural inclinations. “I want people to think that it’s something, but most of the time it isn’t,” he says. “One time I got in a huge argument with a professor. One of my paintings looked like a huge stone tablet, and they were upset that I put a Star of David in it.” He shakes his head. “I put a rectangle and diamond, and the professor saw a Star of David, because that is what he wanted to see. If art can make you be the one making the mistake, it can be helpful. It brings it to the surface. I want art that helps me understand me better.”

Every painting featured in “Sex Wax” is acrylic on fabric, and undeniably a part of Cueva’s delving into his own self. For the past decade, Cueva has been collecting fabrics and objects to serve as canvases, and for the last three years he has also been making fabric. There are palettes that get made for various purposes, and often do not get used for anything. “I don’t feel like we have enough texture,” says Cueva. “We have flat screens all around us, but nothing that we can really touch.” As such, he tries to source fabrics with interesting textures, nothing that he gets them from anywhere he can. One in the exhibit is from an abandoned fabric mill in New Jersey and serves as the foundation for “Bad Apple Bobbing.” It’s made from horse hair, which is stiff and course. The piece, “Vision,” is on an outdoor upholstery and a loose waffle weave with pockets that “catch” and help to pixelate the image even more.

The sizes of the pieces in “Sex Wax” differ dramatically. Cueva says, “Typically, I look at the fabric and get an idea of what size I want the piece to be, and then I stretch it. Then I work on the color, and then lay out where everything needs to go.” The piece “All is Quiet on the Western Front” is made from a double-layered material, while “Walking Away” utilizes an upholstery fabric. “I like the nubs in this one,” notes Cueva. There’s also “Head Injury,” which Cueva calls one of the more emotional pieces in the Exhibit. “Most of the pieces are less intense, but with this one you can feel that something is happening. Things are falling apart. The center is not holding people.” He says it was created during a time in his life that he was at an artist residency, the Vermont Studio Center, which gave him the time and space to create at a more intense degree than is normally available. “I was really upset with life and people that I knew, and I think that it’s portrayed in the piece.”

After his experience at the residency, Cueva has started to undertake and seek out more experiences that allow him to focus on creating. “I totally produce different pieces when doing a residency,” he says. “All the large pieces in the show started at a residency. My studio is small, so that limits how big I can work. The amount of time I have here is also pretty small. I have done big paintings in New York, but it is much easier during a residency where your life is about the art.”

“Lumpy” is the word he uses to describe the piece “Kindling,” and it’s an apt term. “It has dead brushes inside of it,” he reveals. Like almost every piece in the exhibit, it’s beach-themed, but “worked over” a few more times than the others. Why “dead” brushes? It’s simple: they are everything a person needs to get ready for a fire. A beach bonfire is suggestive of a different kind of danger prevalent in Cueva’s work, but also gives viewers room to pause and reflect. It’s a necessary break before delving further into the exhibit to consider the surfboard-as-canvas.

“The three marks on the surfboard are in reference of someone who was trying to raise seagulls in captivity,” Cueva explains. “Seagulls have three little red marks on their beak, so someone tried to put little marks on the feeding device, and the little chicks responded.” When even more marks were added to the feeding device, the chicks looked for the food more aggressively. “Something about the lines means food for the baby seagulls.” It was a revelation Cueva wanted to feature on a relevant object-as-canvas, but actually securing the surfboard was a challenge for a non-surfer. “I didn’t have a surfboard, so I looked for the most warped pieces of wood at Home Depot, wrapped it in burlap, and that’s how the piece came to be,” he says.

Moving through “Sex Wax,” it can feel as if the intimacy is also progressing—but that may be a side effect of developing a deeper understanding of Cueva’s work. “First Kiss” is a painting on a curtain from Target. Cueva remarks on the beauty of the pattern, saying that it reminds him of water. For “No Berries on the Trees,” he points out the synthetic material. Acrylic is also a synthetic, so they mesh well together, providing the perfect interconnection to showcase a woman contemplating diving. “You can’t tell what’s painted and what’s not,” says Cueva as he admires the fabric, which isn’t just allowed to show through the painting but featured as a prominent aspect of the art.

Tucked into the back corner of the exhibit is a smattering of smaller pieces on what could easily be the highly-recognizable mesh material loved by sneakerheads. “I love shoes, so that’s why my first stuff was from that material,” he explains. “I usually do a few little tests with the material and the paint, although now I have a pretty good idea of how the two will interact. Different fabrics will wick and bleed differently.”

When it comes to selecting pieces for the show, it’s a decision based on experience and external recommendations. “There are some more subtle pieces that I decided not to put in the show. I have been curating since 2006, so I have some experience on how to use the space properly. That is how I choose what goes into my show.” However, Cueva also depends on the expertise of others, such as the owner of spaces or those who have worked with spaces and are familiar with optimal layouts. Such expertise helps when it comes to deciding the flow of the pieces and how they fit together. In Cueva’s “A Lot of Bad Things,” he says simply, “I was dealing with a lot of bad stuff, too. It’s like when you are in the surf and you can’t get up. When everything seems to be going wrong and you just keep fighting. This one was done in New York. I started a little at the Vermont residency, but it’s a much different painting now.” The relatively darker piece is a sharp yet welcome turn at this point in the exhibit, mimicking the near-animal attraction of the beach, waves, and surfing. Few would venture into the surf if it wasn’t alluring, much like the lighter, brighter, and seemingly “safer” pieces that welcome visitors to “Sex Wax.” Cueva knows the importance of placement and patterns, and how to utilize them to nudge attendees through the best possible exhibition experience.

Although “A Lot of Bad Things” is one of the most seemingly personal in the exhibit, Cueva says it won’t be difficult to let it go when it’s sold. “I feel like this painting helps me capture my depression, and portray what it feels like to be caught in it. I like the painting, but it will be nice to move on to the next thing. It’s like, it feels good to cry but you don’t want to keep crying over the same thing.” However, the exhibition isn’t solely a journey into darker depths. Winding through a narrow hallway, linking one room to the next, is a Simpsons piece that Cueva says is “like watching The Simpsons. It’s Bart Simpson on Bart Simpson on Bart Simpson, it’s a tessellation. It’s a version of him. It’s not an accurate version of him. The neck fits with the neck, the spiky hair with the spiky hair. When watching a show you can be watching it forever, especially with The Simpsons that has been on forever. I feel like watching TV is this thing that you just do, so that’s why I picked it.” Just something a person does, whether surfing or watching a favorite show, might seem simple enough, but in Cueva’s hands the final product is something much deeper—of course, the same could be said for surfing or television.

There’s another similarity between surfing and television: the isolation mixed with a unique type of connection. According to Cueva, “Something about surfing is that there is communication but you are also isolating yourself. The board can be a dangerous thing for others in the water, but you are still sometimes with others. I feel like that is true with the car culture, computer, and TV culture. Objects can make you keep connected but also creates distance. I feel like art does the opposite,” he says. Art demands quit, but also being an active participant. “People have to come here to see it,” he says. You can see an image online but it won’t be the same.”

Cueva has worked with one curator who noted that he was “obsessed” with time. However, Cueva says it’s actually light that he’s obsessed with—although time and how the brain works is also fascinating. “Time, we experience it kind of cyclically, like the ocean and the seasons, the way they come in and out. So much of what we understand through time, it’s like a detective uncovering stuff, because we have to rely on what people wrote. We have an idea in physics what time is, but we are still discovering weird things about time. Time is a very hard thing to define. They say that if you got to absolute zero, then you could stop time, because if things don’t move then time won’t move either.”

When discussing color and light, and how it works in his art, Cueva is particularly drawn to the color magenta—not, he explains, that it’s really a color. “The color magenta, I am confused and concerned with,” he says. “It’s not real, it’s something we all imagine. I know I sound crazy. Light has a whole spectrum, including gamma and radio waves. But with light there is infrared which we can’t see but we can experience it. In the whole spectrum of infrared, visible light, UV rays, gamma rays… where is the magenta? It doesn’t exist.”

Cueva explains that magenta is a byproduct of having three cones to distinguish colors. There are colors between red and green, and between green and blue. But there aren’t colors between blue and red except green—no magenta. Anything between blue and red is useful to seeing the flesh, like fruits (they are between red and blue). Green is the predominant “thing” that catches our eyes, because humans evolved in a green environment. Cueva admits that there are many subtle faces in his paintings, and for good reason. It’s “another thing in terms of time and how our brain and eyes work. Before the electronic information that our eyes produce gets to our visual cortex in the back of the head, we experience some different things about faces. There is a guy who had a stroke and his visual cortex is dead, but if you smile at him or frown he will smile or frown back, despite the fact that he can’t see you.” Cueva explains that this man emotionally connects because there are things before the visual cortex that monitor faces. It’s precognitive, because you are unaware of it. “We like to think time is right now, but right now is actually a few seconds ago because it takes time for us to process what is happening,” he says.

And how is Cueva spending his current (or just recently passed) time? He’s planning an exhibit that doubles as a surf shop, and is making furniture and displays. “I want something you can walk into. I want you to feel briefly when you come in that you are going into a workshop despite the fact that it’s all fake. The history of the California surf culture is not understood. California becomes the local box for America to pump its propaganda all over the world, and surfing becomes an easy way of doing that because surfing is fun. But it’s something that gets taken from an indigenous community.” Cueva initially thought of the surf shop for “Sex Wax,” but time—always a factor—didn’t allow for it.

He’s also working on other projects, and says he’s also been obsessed with donkeys recently. This has led him to visiting zoos. “I think it came from the democratic party. All the donkeys are kicking, and fighting, and screaming. I did a whole show on improvised weapons. I didn’t anticipate it, but it was during the Berkley stick fights. I feel very strongly that there is this internal anger that isn’t directed at anyone. Technically we have never had it better, but we are all resentful. War doesn’t solve anything, both sides lose and they resent. The South still resents the North.” Sometimes “timeliness” happens just right, and an exhibit featuring kicking, fighting, screaming donkeys has perhaps never been more fitting.

There is also a gallery in Hawaii interested in showing Cueva’s work. Even though he says nobody is actually surfing in any of his paintings, he’s considering the opportunity if the curator is aware of what to genuinely expect. “I just want to make sure that they know what I’m about,” he says.

“Sex Wax” has just ended, but it did so with a bang including a movie night featuring Surf Nazis Must Die, which he dubs “Warriors if they didn’t have a budget” that turns into a black exploitation movie. “It’s very odd,” he says, in the most loving way possible. It’s a sentiment that could be said (also in the most loving way) about some of his own work.

Nicholas Cueva was born in Dana Point, California in 1983. He received his MFA from SAIC in 2011, and has lived in New York for the past eight years. Cueva has exhibited his work around the country, including solo exhibitions at MPTSN and Dreamboat (Chicago, IL), as well as group exhibitions at the Torrance Museum of Art (CA) and Ess Ef Eff (Brooklyn, NY), and more.

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