PATRICK WILSON

"Wilson’s group of six small paintings, About Time (Red), About Time (Orange), About Time (Yellow), About Time (Green), About Time (Blue), and About Time (Violet) (2024), does something similar but different. Each canvas invites us to zoom in, as if for a close-up, then to step back and survey the whole set. This disperses our attention across a panoramic expanse, a nearly fifteen-foot section of our architectural surroundings. Taking us in two directions simultaneously, Wilson’s singular series intensifies and widens (or deepens and broadens) our engagement, drawing us down endlessly fascinating rabbit holes while catapulting us toward a horizon-spanning scan, a big-picture overview of everything, all at once. It’s trippy. It’s dizzying. And it’s well worth the trouble."

- David Pagel

"His riveting rectangles of unnaturally satisfying colors are pretty punchy, they are more than a little freewheeling, and they hold nothing back. Most are outgoing. All are welcoming. Their energy is infectious, enlivening. They elicit excitement. Your pulse speeds up in their presence. No painting of Wilson’s is reticent, retiring, or restrained. He makes get-up-and-go paintings, juiced to the gills, jam-packed with so much visual energy and so eager to deliver it that you can’t help but feel the energy."

- David Pagel

"The sensuality of the surfaces of Wilson’s paintings is spectacular: so sumptuous and aglow with so much to savor that it’s clear that each painting is occupying the here-and-now as if it were the only moment that mattered, and that you, the viewer, are the center of the universe. There is not a smidgen of withholding. There’s discipline, to be sure, but with Wilson’s paintings it’s pretty clear that rigors and regimens have far more to do with his relationship to his art than with what his works expect from us. It’s obvious that Wilson goes to great lengths to get every detail so close to perfect that you’d need a magnifying glass and a laser level to detect any variations in his razor-sharp edges, crisp contours, and perfectly smooth planes."

- David Pagel

"Each of Wilson’s rectangles is also distinguished by its texture—dappled, because it is rolled on, as a house-painter would paint a wall; or glassy, because it is slathered on smoothly, with a palette knife, as a laborer would create a perfectly level cement driveway; or barely there, like fog or smog or smoke or steam, because it is swiped across the increasingly multilayered surface with a squeegee, as window-washers would do their work. The various textures Wilson deploys are variously opaque and translucent, ranging from rectangles that have the presence of homogenous planes, to rectangles that feel like rock-solid slabs of three-dimensional color, to still others that come off as atmospheric, inviting the eye and the mind into misty distances and beyond—to the unfathomable vastness of deep space."

- David Pagel