Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to present new paintings by Patrick Wilson. In his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery Patrick Wilson presents his most ambitiously scaled paintings to date. The suite of five large acrylic paintings is loosely based on Thomas Cole's epic group of paintings from 1832 which examine the course of civilization from rise to ruin. Entitled The Course of Empire, this exhibition will show the first body of work in which Wilson combines large fields of opaque rolled color with smaller passages of intense translucency. Cole's exploration of the stages of civilization serves as a kind of armature for the exhibition, addressing the idea of the passage of time, a recurring theme in Wilsons past work. In these paintings, time is translated into an expanse of spatial color where opaque fields surround exceptionally translucent areas which draw the viewer into a complex imaginary space. The result of dozens of thin, transparent layers of acrylic emulsion, these luminous windows absorb the view into deeper layers of the work, translating the procession of time into shimmering films of shape and color. Patrick Wilson received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School. He has shown in a two-person exhibition at Claremont Graduate University Museum, Claremont, CA, and he has been included in group exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Long Beach Museum, at the Mount San Antonio College, Walnut. His work is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the SunAmerica and KB Homes Collections, Los Angeles, the Capital Group Inc., Los Angeles, the Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles, the Progressive Corporation, Mayfield Village, and the Radio Shack Collection, Dallas, Texas.