Pictures Aside: TIM WILSON

9 March - 15 April 2023

Overview

Nathalie Karg is pleased to present Pictures Aside, a solo show of new paintings

by Tim Wilson. Pictures Aside is Wilson’s second solo-exhibition with the gallery.

“Everything is deceptive, only the mask never lies.”

—Pierre de Marivaux

On the surface, Wilson presents a group of paintings depicting an assortment of mirrored reflections, paintings, prints, photographs, and reproductions. These pictures within the paintings adorn a variety of provisional spaces; foyers, waiting areas, bedside tables, drawing rooms, and motels. Like his previous work, Wilson recasts images of interior spaces and set dressing found in the seemingly endless availability of streaming television and film. These repurposed screen grabs are then filtered through the historical lens of premodern tendencies in representation. This practice, an attempt at slowing the viewer down for reflection remains, yet here, Wilson doubles down by zooming in on the re-depiction of those
quoted histories within his own pictures. This reframing literally and metaphorically rearranges the conditions with which one engages in that contemplation.

“To me, the recursive nature of these paintings is analogous to the infinite regress of thought and meaning—in the way that the definition of words require the use of other, yet to be defined, words to describe them, and so on. Painting is a way of re-contextualizing these strange loops and harnessing meaning indirectly. For example, to quote me speaking now in this context is altogether different than the previous paragraph, despite the fact that I wrote them both.”

—Tim Wilson

In the end, for Wilson, the blunt material facts of painting; color, its liquid form, and the substrates that hold them, are the truth of painting—the mask. Everything else is fiction. But adrift in this sea of artifice, where arbitrary signs and symbols are broken and ripped from their origins, Wilson’s paintings attempt to buoy our thoughts by returning the picture back to painting.