# Patrick Wilson: Keeping Time

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/patrick-wilson-keeping-time/
March 13 — June 5, 2021 · Gallery I · Artists: Patrick Wilson

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Wilson. The exhibition marks Wilson’s ninth solo presentation with the gallery and will be on view from March 13 – April 24, 2021.

Patrick Wilson is an abstract painter and perceptualist, whose idiosyncratic work is imbued with such California movements as ‘Hard Edge’ and ‘Light and Space,’ and a keen discipline of observing and considering the ever-changing contemporary landscape.

Throughout his career, Wilson has continuously played with the idea of making paintings within paintings. For the past twenty years he has produced precisely layered super-flat paintings that seem at once both solid and transparent. And in his most recent works, the artist’s unique and masterful sense of materiality — fastidiously applied layers of acrylic paint — reveals an evolutionary step into further complex fields of color that resemble slow-moving atmospheric puzzles of light and space with no clear solution yet allowing for fluidity and openness. Often caught in a zone between extreme physical precision and optical ambiguity, Wilson’s work triggers not just curiosity, but the ability to perceive the beauty of refined complexity.

The exhibition features an array of works on canvas including a new series of paintings comprised of two panels slightly offset from one another — by minimally altering the shape and structure of these paintings Wilson gives a subtle nudge to the confines of the pure rectangle inviting further possibility, as well as a pronounced sculptural dynamic into his overall practice. Also included in the exhibition are a small group paintings from the artist’s Disrupted Grid series, wherein Wilson visually disrupts the idea of traditional geometry, considering the illusion of stability and our dependence upon it in our daily lives.

Along with the desire to push boundaries within his own practice of painting, Wilson’s compositions also provide threads of logic, pleasure, and whim — where color simply becomes the subject matter. Each piece is a wordless poem expressing its varying range of emotional sensations and tones — from the palatable hazy warmth found in the painting *Saturday Walk*to the syncopation of Modernist architecture found in the painting *Inside Space*to the yellow-violet bruising in *Memory Code —*Wilson’s abstract pictures are inspired by a visceral attraction to look and to see, as well as by the notion that everything is in transition, that change is constant, and that the act of seeing is very much a transient part of life.