Nathan Preston (b.1992 Essex, England) works under the name Preston Paperboy, a pseudonym that carries something of the street's democratic distribution — art delivered, unsolicited, to whoever is present.
Preston studied architecture before moving into fine art, and the training is legible in his work: not in anything rigid or schematic, but in the structural intelligence with which he builds a composition. His pictures are layered rather than painted, accumulated rather than resolved — facial fragments, crude gestural marks, charcoal, and text slogans pressed into proximity until something that functions like a portrait emerges without ever quite becoming one. The likeness is withheld. What remains is presence.
Two motifs recur across the entirety of his output and operate simultaneously as signature and as argument: a single left eye — what Preston identifies as a window to the soul — and the outline of a frowning face with dollar signs in place of eyes. These are not decorative devices. Placed in the same field, they stage a persistent tension between interiority and appetite, between the capacity to see and the condition of being governed entirely by want. The subjects that run through his work — love, loss, envy, desire, the way one can become the other — find their visual grammar here.
His most sustained bodies of work include the Fatale series, sequentially numbered female portrait works that accumulate into something approaching a typology of feminine presence as filtered through the Western image tradition; the Wall Friend works; and the MLISA series, which places his visual language in direct conversation with the most scrutinised face in the history of painting. The latter in particular demonstrates the cultural literacy and ambition that separates Preston's practice from more purely decorative engagements with street art portraiture.
He has exhibited in London, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and Miami.
Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot.