This fall at the UAM, Patrick Wilson will present new and recent geometric abstract paintings. In his meticulous yet sensual, nearly sculptural canvases, Wilson weds color to structured shapes in intricately layered and overlapping transparent rectilinear scrims and narrow lines of acrylic paint. These artworks are meant to be experiential. Duration, the real time of conscious experience, is an essential aspect of his practice. He invokes duration both in his acts of creative “unfolding” as they transpire in the studio and in his expectations about viewers’ subsequent reception and interpretation of his artwork.

Any art object is fundamentally an artifact of the artist’s process. Wilson pulls thin films of acrylic paint and emulsion across taut surfaces and the chromatic, spatial, and compositional associations he makes are recorded on the canvas. These marks provide evidence of his visual perception, thoughts, and action. Recorded as well is Wilson’s obvious pleasure in exploring the physical properties of the medium. If from a cognitive perspective we assign metaphors of physical movement to mental activities, there can also be found in the paintings of Pull an unimpeded openness in the visual strategies the artist employs that suggests freedom and expansiveness. Wilson’s stratified color fields jiggle, flicker, and shift, destabilizing static interpretation. They move…and propose that viewers move too, through their own perceptions and recollections of color and light.

For Patrick Wilson: Pull, twelve new and recent paintings will be exhibited in the Louise Carlson and Robert Gumbiner Galleries of the University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach. In addition, three works on paper from Patrick Wilson’s 2008 series Suite for Mount Washington will be displayed. For these gouache serigraphs, Wilson worked with master printer Christian Zickler, which freed the artist to explore formal and conceptual relationships that arose from a simple vocabulary of shapes and colors and which grew quickly into the complex visual syntax that presently informs his practice.

About the artist:
Patrick Wilson currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Claremont Graduate University in 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include Color Space at Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe in New York, Good Barbecue at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and The View from My Deck at Marx & Zavattero in San Francisco. Notable group exhibitions in which Wilson has participated include the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, curated by Sarah Bancroft; Electric Mud at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, TX, curated by David Pagel; Keeping is Straight: Right Angles and Hard Edges in Contemporary Southern California Art, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA, curated by Peter Frank; Claremont Connections: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; and Gyroscope at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.