exhibitions - slowfood
Patrick Wilson: Slow Food
September 12 – October 17, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12
6:30 - 8 pm
Curator’s Office is pleased to open its fall season with a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Wilson. Entitled Slow Food, the five paintings on exhibit encourage the viewer to recommit to the pleasure of carefully looking at and savoring the elements of an abstract work of art, allowing for deep aesthetic nourishment. A sophisticated colorist, Wilson displays mastery in creating rectilinear layered spaces through line, layers, pigment densities, variegated light, and textures. Drawing on a modernist lineage, the artist manages to push abstraction’s formalist language into realms of surprising intellectual complexity and visual gratification. Wilson’s dedication to his craft and his pursuit of meaningful beauty are refreshingly unapologetic.
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His insistence on slowness allows for nuances to emerge that may otherwise go overlooked. The artist claims, “The act of consciously slowing down and taking the time to really look was not only a necessity in producing these paintings, but is in fact essential to appreciate them. In a culture obsessed with speed and abbreviation over all else, we are becoming less and less willing to spend time considering anything containing more information than 140 characters. I hope that this new body of work is a counterbalance to that way of thinking – slow, complex, unpredictable, beautiful.”
Patrick Wilson received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School. Recent exhibitions include “Electric Mud” at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, TX, curated by David Pagel; “iCandy: Current Abstraction in Southern California”, Cypress College Art Gallery, Cypress; “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”, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. His work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art.
image above: Patrick Wilson, Gray Area, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 41” x 37”