LOS ANGELES—Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is welcoming the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of new work by Patrick Wilson which opens on January 20, 2018.
Patrick Wilson’s intensely colorful canvases are populated by hard-edged, quadrilateral planes in varying opacities, layered and cantilevered in carefully finessed compositions. His new works reflect an increasingly energetic complexity that Lilly Wei has described in a recent essay as “breathtaking and nuanced, the juxtapositions [between colors] often quirky and unpredictable.”
Viewers often assume, at first glance, that Wilson’s paintings are composed of thin sheets of plastic or metal that have been airbrushed and assembled, but they are in fact composed of fastidiously applied layers of acrylic paint. He is an immaculate painter, working carefully by hand with tape and a drywall blade to create seamless planes that seem at once solid and transparent, referential to the modernist architecture that dots the Southern California landscape and to the iconic “light and space” artists and West Coast hard edge abstractionists (Larry Bell, Frederic Hammersley, Robert Irwin, John McLaughlin) who have engaged with these peculiarities and particularities of atmosphere and surface in their work.
The finished paintings are pristine, but also carry evidence of the artist’s hand – a subtle bloom of color along an otherwise flawlessly straight line, a slight whimsy in the corner of a square – always inviting the viewer to slow down and examine their nearly sculptural surfaces. They are a pleasure to look at, and it is this insistence on the real value of formal beauty as something to be desired, pursued, and considered deeply that defines Wilson’s paintings.
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