PATRICK WILSON by Miles McEnery Gallery

PATRICK WILSON

AMERINGER M c E N E RY YO H E

525 WEST 22ND STREET NEW YORK NY 10011 TEL 212 445 0051 WWW.AMY-NYC.COM

THE QUIET CROWD

Walking into Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, I was confronted with the singular break from geometric, color field, and Hard-edge painting traditions that Patrick Wilson’s paintings represent. In front of me was a great Kenneth Noland painting, Via Fill (1968), which was flanked by Wilson’s Together (2014) on the left hand wall, and his somewhat larger Seafood (2013) behind me. Both painters used tape in these paintings, one of the telltale materials in absentia of Hard-edge painting. Tape is the mask that allows for a continuous, crisp edge along a shape, and it seems to work best with acrylic paint. “Hard-edge” was the term the critic Jules Langsner used in the late 1950s to describe a group of Los Angeles-based painters — Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg — who worked primarily in flat color and geometric shapes. Lawrence Alloway appropriated the term for a revised 1960 version of the 1959 Langsner-curated exhibition “Four Abstract Classicists.” The Alloway exhibition was shown in England and Ireland and was called “West Coast Hard-edge.” The term “Hard-edge” came to stand for a cool aesthetic of pragmatic craft and a use of space that is not recessive in the manner of traditional pictorial depths. Instead, Hard-edge painting functions like a commercial sign, projecting its shapes into and across actual space while also inviting the intimacy required to inspect the sheen or studied nonchalance of its workmanship. If there are depths, they are those of iconic space, wherein flatness connotes infinity, which is both close to us and far away, and eternity, which renders narrative time in orthogonal perspective, and thus renders contemporaneity meaningless. In his essay, Other Criteria (1972), Leo Steinberg described Noland’s “Horizontals” (of which Via Fill is representative) as “the fastest paintings I know,” meaning that the viewer takes them in as a whole view — a gestalt, if you will — in an Kenneth Noland Via Fill, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 37 x 120 inches 99.1 x 309.9 cm Art © Estate of Kenneth Noland/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

instant. To this end, Noland’s execution of the painting is not belabored. The paint is applied as horizontal stripes masked off by tape, and that’s pretty much that. Or so it would seem, except for the fact that his color and proportionality haunts us

after the first take, producing light and a sense of expanse that is “like” landscape, but not of it. But the sense that painting can come near to an irreducible facticity while retaining a quality of unquantifiable otherness is what gives radical abstract painting its poetry. It is this sense of the poetic that binds Noland’s work closer to Abstract Expressionism than perhaps it initially appears to be, even as it purports to let go of the “touch” of the brush. In contrast with Noland’s “Horizontals,” Patrick Wilson’s paintings forego the effect of a unifying surface. That isn’t to say his paintings don’t unify, but their unification is emergent, riding a crest of what Meyer Schapiro described in writing about the entire arc of Piet Mondrian’s development as “an astonishing range of qualities.” These qualities are, in Wilson’s case, compressed into each single canvas. Whatever else Wilson’s paintings are, they are not “fast” in the manner of Noland. And Wilson’s spatial play is much more dynamic than that of the Hard-edge painters he might otherwise invoke through his use of tape to obtain a sharp, clean edge, his floating rectangular planes and his pinstriped lines. Within a shallow optical space, Wilson instigates an active push-andpull of planes and lines that advance and recede. There are no diagonals; every plane and outline maintains a right-angled frontality. This sense of compacted movement in Wilson’s paintings is furthered by both

color and surface. There are dozens of color-bearing forms in each painting. Some of these are rectangular planes, and some are lines outlining rectangular areas. The lines themselves are just wide enough to register as bands; that is to say, they have at a minimal ratio an area that is the bearer of color. There also are wider outlines that are legitimately bands rather than lines. At least they seem to be there at first. But as we spend more time gazing at these paintings, it begins to appear as if the bands, and even the narrower lines, which in memory, as we glance from painting to painting, seem to hover like floating frames, might actually be the edges or slivers of other rectangles that are almost, but not quite, obscured by shapes in front of them. The wider white bands in partially obscured vertical rectangles in the center look like planes masked out by the smaller vertical rectangles in front of them. Both the outlined and planar rectangles crowd, overlap and appear to shift behind and in front of each other, and a viewer could spend hours plotting the location of the hidden edges and borders. One reason why we can be seduced into losing ourselves in such a task is the tantalizing, nearly graspable space in Wilson’s paintings. The palette of Wilson’s paintings is lush, and the paintings are strangely shadowed. Some planes reveal darker under-painting here and there through a gel medium that suspends the over-color in a kind of glaze. The planes with these shadow glazes have a smooth thickness

Patrick Wilson Seafood, 2013 Acrylic on canvas 49 x 59 inches 124.5 x 149.9 cm

that advances from the surface of the canvas, as though the paint was squeegeed on while the rest of the canvas was masked off. Thus, the “push-pull” effect of Wilson’s planes advancing and receding is literalized in actual relief. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that there are different qualities between the surfaces of each color, be they planes or lines. Certain raised surfaces are polished smooth, as though they were sanded as they were built up. The surfaces that aren’t as built up are still evenly matte, almost light absorbent — an effect that is intensified by their being thin enough to show the weave of the canvas. The fine pebbling of canvas diffuses illumination beyond the initial condition of matte, tonal color. The matte tonality induces an optical muffling, as though a hush has fallen on the jostling planes, and provides a certain quietude that binds the dozens of colors in each painting. How

many greens and blues are contained in Berkeley (2015), or reds in Crab Pot (2014)? It’s easy to wonder if Wilson makes the quietest crowded pictures or the most crowded quiet pictures. All the adjacencies of color produce fiendishly complex relational chromatic shifts, especially along the “seams” in Wilson’s compositions, those optical trenches where the larger shapes appear to verge on each other. But even that is an illusion. The six larger areas of Beer Garden (2015), for instance, are actually comprised of several shapes whose edges bleed out in close tonal hues toward the approaching staggered edges of the areas to each side. Our gaze seems to step down along these edges, always with another color to perch on. The narrowing and compression of the edges in the right-ofcenter vertical and the two principle horizontals divide the composition into six main areas, but it becomes very difficult to assert where the borders actually are. Does the earth brown/red horizontal band above (and underneath?) the deep teal green of the lower right area belong to the green or to the area above it? Does the red piping that corners back behind the green contain the brown/red band? And how subtle are the shifts from deep ochers to earth reds in the painting! Logic and unfathomability pile up in each of Wilson’s paintings. The way color shifts when partitioned into different areas by a dividing line belonging to another “ghost” rectangle (as opposed to the fullness of a plane of color) recalls Josef

Albers’ luminous demonstrations of shifty color adjacencies. But Wilson provides them in Baroque plentitude compared with the relatively austere classicism of Albers’ Homage to the Square series. And in that plentitude the apparent centering within the frame of the canvas of Wilson’s compositional decisions loses its certainty. To understand how this takes place we must direct our attention to the edges of the picture plane where we can see several planes seemingly pull back towards the center. But behind every reading of one plane of color lies another, so that it becomes impossible to determine what any ground color might actually be. Even in Champion (2015), a large painting with a grey that runs nearly around the entire perimeter of the picture, the color proves not to be determinative, as it appears to shift in brightness and temperature before disappearing altogether behind the much brighter light grey that seems to belong to an extended vertical rectangle that is itself masked off into bands by a dark grey rectangle above and a horizontal tonal red rectangle below center, both coming in from the right. The light grey rectangle seems to disappear behind a milky white band at the bottom of the canvas that could belong to another vertical plane that is itself masked off by colors in front of it. Just a thin edge of the light grey appears at the bottom of the canvas, which suggests that white actually belongs to a rectangular band rather than a full plane. But it’s so hard to be sure. And since the color does

shift around the edges, even in this painting, it becomes impossible to feel confident that there aren’t more planes spreading beyond the visual field of the canvas boundary. This haunting feeling that we are only glimpsing a cropped centering of a larger field, like a section of a tiled floor that could extend in all directions beyond the immediate field, is even more pronounced in some of Wilson’s more compact paintings, such as Pitchman (2014), where the color shifts more regularly, and perhaps more dramatically, around the edge. We’re haunted by the tension between stillness and kineticism in Wilson’s work, and the sense that while we think we are looking at the hieratic address of a frontal view, we might, instead, be looking at an aerial view — like looking down at the flat roofs of a warehouse district. So our reading of space toggles back and forth between a grounded and a suspended orientation.

Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts Trompe l’oeil. The Reverse of a Framed Painting, 1670 Oil on canvas 26 x 34 inches 66.4 x 87 cm

The centripetal gravitational pull in his compositions is opposed by an indeterminacy of background color. Every reading is like a ghost of its alternatives, and sometimes they are all present at once. In apprehending spatiality, the combination of overlap and the sequence of chromatic light and dark in Wilson’s paintings, we are brought to the threshold of analogic awareness. Spatiality is a condition for temporality and, thus, memory. Likenesses arise, but what kind of likenesses in work so resolutely abstract? Maybe the likenesses reside in the spaces themselves, and what is being presented is a range of possible spaces within painting culture. The palette and the pictorial organization of First Thing (2014) suggest an interior on the right third of the painting and

a foggy sea light on the left: a Matissean setup of light and shadow in a view from a hotel room. Fog Scissors (2015) suggests perhaps another balcony, this time seen from the front. The wide grey band rectangle on the lower left of Oyster Bar (2015) brings to mind the backs on canvases in 17th century Dutch trompe l’oeil paintings such as Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts’s Trompe l’oeil. The Reversal of a Framed Painting (1670). The shallowness of Wilson’s space, which opens up in its seams to a premonition of depths, acts like the space in Trompe l’oeil. It is a space that is compacted enough to maintain a near excruciating tension with the mythical picture plane, and is just deep enough to be graspable. Wilson’s paintings enjoy their own spatial dynamic, wherein architectural scale collapses into something that is within human reach. Wilson’s paintings act in a contested space between imminence and creaturely materiality. Some abstract art is held to address, through austerity and even humility, conditions and aspirations of consciousness that in a less secular age would be termed “spiritual.” The paintings of Agnes Martin are a worthy example. Wilson goes in another direction, toward proliferating exegesis, an optical Talmud of recombinant interpretive possibilities. This, too, n points to a mystery.

Stephen Westfall

Stephen Westfall is a painter, art critic, and academic. He is an Associate Professor in Painting and Department Graduate Director at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University and was recently the Co-chair in Painting at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. His writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and BOMB Magazine, among other publications, and he regularly contributes to Art in America.

Together

First Thing

Pitchman

Oyster Bar

Crab Pot

Field Day

Green Dream

The Negotiation

Beer Garden

Berkeley

Fog Scissors

Champion

Kimono

Big Year

Wild West

Suggestion and Possibility

Swamp Boogie

Puente Hills

San Andreas

PLATE LIST

page 9

Together, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches 55.9 x 55.9 cm

page 19

Field Day, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 41 x 37 inches 104.1 x 94 cm

page 11

First Thing, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 33 x 35 inches 83.8 x 88.9 cm

page 21

Green Dream, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches 55.9 x 55.9 cm

page 13

Pitchman, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 33 x 35 inches 83.8 x 88.9 cm

page 23

The Negotiation, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 41 x 37 inches 104.1 x 94 cm

page 15

Oyster Bar, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches 55.9 x 55.9 cm

page 25

Beer Garden, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 22 x 22 inches 55.9 x 55.9 cm

page 17

Crab Pot, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 41 x 37 inches 104.1 x 94 cm

page 27

Berkeley, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 67 inches 182.9 x 170.2 cm

page 29

Fog Scissors, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 67 inches 182.9 x 170.2 cm

page 39

Suggestion and Possibility, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 49 x 59 inches 124.5 x 149.9 cm

page 31

Champion, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 67 inches 182.9 x 170.2 cm

page 41

Swamp Boogie, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 49 x 59 inches 124.5 x 149.9 cm

page 33

Kimono, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 67 inches 182.9 x 170.2 cm

page 43

Puente Hills, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 27 x 21 inches 68.6 x 53.3 cm

page 35

Big Year, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 49 x 59 inches 124.5 x 149.9 cm

page 45

San Andreas, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 27 x 21 inches 68.6 x 53.3 cm

page 37

Wild West, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 49 x 59 inches 124.5 x 149.9 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

PATRICK WILSON 28 May – 3 July 2015

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

Publication © 2015 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved The Quiet Crowd © 2015 Stephen Westfall Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles, CA Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY

ISBN: 978-1-4951-3009-0

AMERINGER M c E N E RY YO H E