My eyes gazed at the Moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the color of the Moon ... I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them. 

— from “The Distance to the Moon,” Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino, 1965

The moon is a harsh mistress, teasing the earth's waters to throb and bulge as she orbits. Our oceans heave and bristle at the mere suggestion of her lunar gravity, tugging the deeper, darker creatures and secrets from the inky abyss to the shimmering surface, exposing them to all who emerge to howl at her visage. Her night tides illuminate the parts of our world that prefer to remain in blackness, startling and exposing them with her soft, persuasive glow.

It is within this luminosity that Igor Hosnedl finds the subjects of Night Tide, his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and his first with Nicodim.

Each monumental painting within Night Tide is an ethereal non-narrative starring almost-human characters as they grapple with their own autonomy in the face of nature. The artist’s figures are completely at the mercy of forces over which they have no control: the machinations of the cosmos, the elements, the tides, birth, death, and everything seen by the light of the moon. Those constants provide the architecture for the subjects to find purpose beyond mere existence inside Hosnedl’s epic landscapes, the passion, the love, the sorrow, the joy that fills the spaces in-between the cruel gears of a life cycle. Night Tide is an exposition of the depths of soul pulled up naked and raw by the gravity of heavenly bodies.

—Ben Lee Ritchie Handler