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A new year brings new hope.

This new year, however, has felt much like the old.

Since March 2020, it has felt like one long COVID-19-induced suspension in time. Like many of you, I began this new year as a positive COVID case. Thankfully, with only mild symptoms, I have recovered. In some way, I found getting infected with the coronavirus liberating as I no longer have that distant, yet continuing, uncertainty about what will happen if I get COVID.

The outside noise continues to be loud. There are ever-polarized opinions on anything and everything, and I wonder what life will be like after everything that has happened. (The pandemic will end, right?) No matter the scenarios that flood my head, I still believe the best way to move forward is to react, adapt, and embrace. Beauty remains the antidote during troubling times, and this new NUVO, the first edition of 2022, is beauty in printed form.

NUVO editor Claudia Cusano.

Nicolas Party, our cover subject for this Issue 92, has won widespread attention of late, his name an apt metaphor for his acclaim in the art world. The Swiss-born visual artist was in Montreal last month to install his current exhibition, L’heure mauve, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he was photographed by NUVO contributor Guillaume Simoneau. As Esmé Hogeveen writes: Nicolas Party’s “work deals in unresolved polarities. His portraits often feature figures who are ambiguous in terms of age and gender. These subjects embody a Modigliani-esque elegance and severity, and they typically appear on two-dimensional planes and in front of solid-colour backdrops. Many of the figures themselves are also brightly hued and posed with creatures or objects from nature rendered in an uncanny scale or position. Like his portraits, Party’s landscapes and sculptures evoke tension between familiarity and strangeness. A biomorphic quality threads across his work, wherein figures are questionably human, and landscapes and objects feel somehow alive.”

The photo essay this issue, “The Sublime Beauty of Time” by Italian photographer Nicola Bertellotti, documents the remains of great European villas. Bertellotti’s work has been shown in galleries across the world, and as the foreword notes, “these photographs are heavy with time and longing, summoning up the grand ghosts of the past in peeling plaster and shattered glass.”

The Canadian voices we celebrate this issue are diverse: performance artist Miles Greenberg (“Sculpting the Weight of Moments”); chef Andrea Alridge (“Mastering Heat”); interior designer Paolo Ferrari (“Experiment & Elegance”); and novelist Marlowe Granados (“Taking Whimsy Seriously”). In fashion, much emphasis is put on trend forecasting, but it seems what’s old is new again—bright colours, prints, and leather—showcased in “Sartorial Prose: A Collage of Equilibrium”.

The news/media cycle is entrenched in chasing the new. With NUVO, I hope we lead you somewhere and fulfill a curiosity. Enjoy the ride.

Keep an eye on NUVOmagazine.com over the coming weeks for stories from the spring edition of NUVO, Issue 92. Click here to receive a copy of your own.