Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Patrick Wilson. The artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery is on view 5 September through 26 October 2024. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by David Pagel.

For nearly three decades, Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Wilson has explored the emotive possibilities of color and form through paint. The works on view continue the investigation, amalgamating the seemingly paradoxical movements of Hard Edge Abstraction, Color Field, and California Light and Space into highly charged visual experiences which challenge notions of geometric stability and planar logic, and offer unexpected chromatic exchanges. Meticulous layers of acrylic appear at first to be collaged onto the canvas in orderly fashion, but are in fact the result of a complex mix of methodical layering, consideration, discovery, failure, and a near constant negotiation between unexpected physical, visual, and conceptual relationships.

The paintings, despite their exacting precision and attention to detail, are decidedly hand made and highly dependent on sensitivity and touch. They are not premeditated—rather, the works unfold organically in the studio, completely improvised, over long periods of time. Luminous and ethereal planes are contained by sharp edges and metered by finite lines, forming puzzling compositions that seem to shift in complexity with extended consideration. The exhibition invites visual intimacy; an opportunity to slow down and simply look, to connect in a personal way between painting and self, to access analog thinking.

David Pagel writes, “Looking at a painting by Wilson is its own reward. But it’s more than that. It’s a sharpening of perception, a focusing of thinking, an extension of attention span, and an expansion of consciousness.”